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Higher Education Marketing offers Internet marketing services for colleges and Universities: Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click marketing and Google Analytics.Fri, 09 Dec 2016 14:32:56 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.16International Student Recruitment Opportunities in Africahttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/international-student-recruitment-africa
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/international-student-recruitment-africa#commentsWed, 07 Dec 2016 14:54:10 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=19182]]>As international student recruitment becomes increasingly competitive, more and more institutions are looking beyond the most obvious source countries in Asia to emerging markets around the world. Among the most intriguing of these prospective markets is Africa, the fastest growing economic region in the world after East Asia, whose young population has a huge demand for quality education. According to UNESCO statistics, the number of African students enrolled in tertiary education more than doubled to 12.2 million from 2000 to 2013.

Nigeria is the leading source of African international students and the logical focal point for recruitment efforts but it is far from the only promising market for colleges and universities. The 2016 U.S. Open Doors Report on International Education Exchange reveals the four highest source countries of African students in the United States during the 2015-16 academic year:

Nigeria (10,674 students)

Ghana (3,049)

Kenya (3,019)

South Africa (1,813)

Language has to be considered when choosing regions to target, as the significant French colonial influence in parts of the continent makes France the most popular overall study destination for African students abroad. By some counts, there are over 3,000 languages spoken in Africa, but 130 million speak English as either a native or secondary language and it’s an official language of at least 23 African countries.

Understanding Africa from a Higher Education Perspective

Africa’s impressive economic momentum in the 21st century has been fuelled by its vast oil and mineral reserves. Although the collapse of global commodity prices and repercussions from the Arab Spring have decelerated its growth since 2010, continuing diversification has made it resilient and three powerful trends are likely to sustain it (as detailed in a recent report from the World Economic Forum).

First, the continent has a young population, growing labour force and rising middle class – for example, one-fifth of Nigeria’s 188 million people are between the ages of 15 and 24 and the country’s middle class has grown six-fold in 14 years. Second, urbanization is a megatrend profoundly transforming African societies, expanding consumption behaviour and infrastructure investments. Lagos, Nigeria is one of the world’s most populous cities, needing an educated workforce in areas like business, engineering, medicine and IT to support its sustained economic viability.

The rapid pace of technological change is the third major factor signalling growth potential. Africa is the fastest adopter of smartphones in the world, enabling it to leapfrog infrastructure limitations through instant access to information and mobile banking. An increasingly healthy ecosystem of tech start-ups in several African nations is another source of strong demand for educated talent.

Nigeria’s Unique Appeal for International Student Recruitment

Nigeria is in a league of its own regarding population growth and potential international student recruitment. With a median age of 18, it’s on pace to become one of the world’s most populous countries by century’s end. Total tertiary enrolment is projected to more than double from 2.3 million in 2013 to 4.8 million in 2024. Despite recent falling oil prices, Nigeria still has the highest GDP and one of the fastest growing economies in the continent.

The British Council recently projected that Nigeria will contribute the strongest average annual growth in post-graduate student mobility through 2024 (+8.3%) of all source markets studied. A closer look at its growing demand for higher education reveals why it is such a great recruitment market. Education is one of the biggest priorities for Nigeria’s growing middle class as evidenced by the booming primary and secondary private school market, serving 43.6% of children in urban areas, according to 2014 figures cited by ICEF Monitor.

Importantly, more than 1.7 million Nigerians seek admission to a domestic university each year but only about half a million succeed. The number of Nigerian universities has leaped from 51 to 128 from 2005 to 2013 and the National Universities Commission has promised nine new private universities but the government is well aware it can’t cope with increasing demand. Various reports suggest that the sharp jump in new education institutions has caused quality to suffer, motivating more parents to look outside their borders to prepare their children for expanding opportunities.

The UK has been the most popular study destination, hosting 17,920 Nigerians in 2014/15, but the U.S., Canada and neighbouring Ghana have been receiving more students in the last few years at the expense of the UK. The opportunity of a working permit after three years of studies makes Canada an increasingly popular choice. Many schools participate in events like the recent EducationUSA Nigeria annual virtual college fair, where officers visit high schools to discuss higher education opportunities in their country and the international study experience. Concerns about agent fraud and hidden fees have prompted increased certification processes for agents, such as the Nigerian Association of UK Certified Education Agents.

Considerations for Student Recruitment in Nigeria

Institutions looking to recruit in Nigeria should understand its unique linguistic and ethnic diversity (there are four major ethnic groups and hundreds of smaller ones dominant in different areas of the country) and, besides recruitment agents, look to proactively develop relationships with local schools and partners. Mark Brooks, a consultant working in the region, advises that in-country connections are key: “the schools in Nigeria wish to develop working relationships rather than be seen as a captive recruitment market.”

Focusing initial efforts on solid relationships with a few schools and connections is a worthwhile strategy for gaining a foothold in Nigeria and the wider continent. Working with school leaders to develop exchanges is an effective initiative for mutual benefits.

Among international source markets, Sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria generally have high academic qualifications, with SAT scores reported to be as high or better than students from other regions. According to 2015 research from the World Education Services (WES), this region has the largest proportion of “strivers” and also numerous “highfliers”, indicating academic preparedness isn’t a problem. Strategically offering attractive financial aid packages is one way higher education institutions can recruit more of these highly qualified students.

Although the fundamentals of student demand in Nigeria remain strong, schools should be aware that the collapse in world oil prices has significantly devalued the country’s currency and placed the stability of its extensive scholarship systems in doubt. Earlier this year, the Nigerian government announced that its Central Bank would no longer allow foreign exchange transactions for study abroad payments.

Many current students abroad have been experiencing delays in their scholarship payments, effectively ‘stranding’ thousands and forcing recipients of at least one funding agency to finish their studies in Nigeria. Incidentally, state-sponsored Saudi Arabian students abroad are facing a similar predicament. While this substantial drop in purchasing power will unfortunately limit the number of Nigerians able to afford foreign tuitions, education consultant Felix Adedayo believes that the motivation to study abroad will only increase because Nigerian-based multinational companies prefer foreign degree holders.

“They have a better chance in Nigeria than anywhere else because they are appropriately positioned to get good jobs in Nigeria than their counterparts who studied locally when they come back home,” Adedayo said.

The aforementioned WES research indeed suggests career prospects are the biggest motivator for Sub-Saharan students choosing schools abroad, including the institution’s reputation among employers and its career preparation services. Cost is more likely to be a factor here than for students from other regions. While survey responses indicated location was the least important attribute, the top five U.S. institutions currently receiving Nigerians are interestingly all in the state of Texas.

Leveraging Students and Alumni for African Student Recruitment

Besides establishing local connections in the region, there are opportunities for colleges and universities to expand their student recruitment in Africa by leveraging alumni relationships and digital marketing initiatives. Helping to create welcoming communities for your current students, faculty and alumni from Africa is a great place to start building a bridge for future enrolment. Word of mouth is a powerful influencer, particularly in this age of social media saturation, and prospective international students will want to know about the experiences of previous students from their country.

How do you create a successful student and alumni ambassador program? Look around your campus and social media marketing channels for particularly active and passionate students that champion your school, including those who already lead campus tours and orientation and those naturally drawn to answer questions on your online portals. Establish clear goals and guidelines for their participation so they know what to expect. Most student ambassadors are unpaid but may receive free admission to events and other perks along with professional development, networking and promotion opportunities.

Alumni can be your most authentic and convincing ambassadors for prospective students and their parents, sharing their extensive knowledge and unique experiences of campus and post-graduate life. Selected alumni could be enlisted to make presentations, participate in campus tours or off-campus fairs, interview prospective students, contribute to blogs or social media, and record video interviews for your website and YouTube channel. Alumni mentors can provide support, integration and career advice, and stories about their personal experiences.

Develop effective collaboration between your international recruitment staff and your alumni office to establish a sustainable outreach program. Schools like the University of York recruit international ambassadors during their last term of study who are known to be based in underrepresented areas, promoting their alma mater’s reputation by delivering independent talks at schools and colleges, and meeting face-to-face with prospective students and their parents. Quantifiable outcomes, such as changes in applications or conversion rates, can help evaluate the success of these initiatives.

Digital Marketing Initiatives for Student Recruitment in Africa

A 2014 survey of students online by TopUniversities.com found that students in Africa and Latin America are more than twice as likely as those in North America and Europe to view social media as essential to higher education research. Students in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Senegal are very active on networks like Facebook and Twitter, where they can learn more about the sociable side of your school, including their unique segment of interest.

Example: African students can learn more about a school’s diversity through Facebook groups like this one at Concordia University. Although they run independently from university administration, social media monitoring with a tool like Hootsuite can keep staff informed about potential reputation management issues.

Posting occasional testimonials by African students and demonstrations of their involvement on campus, such as clubs or awards, can enhance your school’s image for both current and future students. Recognize that nearly all of your prospects will be accessing your website with a smartphone, so ensure that your financial support opportunities and student visa information is easily accessible.

Example: The University of Windsor has dedicated landing pages for key international recruitment markets, including Africa. These include a general video and viewbook for international students as well as specific information deemed important for these prospects, including the weather in Canada, housing, transportation, student groups and services, and local African restaurants and shops.

While a lack of financial resources may limit widespread student mobility from African countries relative to other regions, the continent’s growing population, economy and hunger for quality education make it a promising recruitment market for colleges and universities. It can be a challenging territory for admissions teams to navigate but many schools are finding the investment to be worthwhile.

“There are a lot of talented students there,” says Calvin Smith, Webster University’s director of international recruitment and services. The St. Louis-based institution, which has branch campuses throughout the world, opened a new campus in Accra, Ghana in 2013. “They’re very much looking for a U.S.-style education, but they do not have the funding to come to the United States.”

Investigating your analytics data can help you better understand how students from these countries are interacting with your school online, providing insights into which specific region may deliver the best ROI and which programs of study are most popular. Optimizing your web resources and developing targeted digital marketing techniques are comparatively simple ways of accessing this burgeoning market with a low cost and high potential impact.

It’s been called the ‘YouTube of blogging,’ drawn comparisons to Reddit as a viral engine, and was created by two of the founders of Twitter. It’s estimated to attract somewhere between 15 and 20 million unique monthly visitors, despite being just over three years old. It’s free, easy to use, and rewards quality over name value.

For many content marketers, Medium, a long-form blogging platform launched in 2012, represents the next great hope, a powerful tool to help them cut through the noise of today’s crowded digital marketplace and increase their exposure and engagement with their target audience. But does it justify the hype? And what kind of opportunities does it offer for schools?

Read on to find out more about this exciting newcomer to the online sphere, and how your school can utilise its enormous potential.

What is Medium? An Intro for Student Recruitment Professionals

Medium was founded in 2012 by Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who had previously been involved in founding both Twitter and Blogger. The site’s aim is to present readers with content that will interest them, with an emphasis on quality over other factors which traditionally influence online visibility, such as site authority, SEO, and post quantity. In the Medium team’s own words, “Medium is a place where the measure of success isn’t views, but viewpoints. Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications.”

The site’s emphasis on long-form intellectual posts over the shorter, snappier content favoured by other platforms helped it quickly gain a cult following, with writers of all stripes using the site to gain exposure and build their followings.

Medium itself has been developing in its own content for the site since 2013, paying a small handful of writers on a freelance basis, and partnering with big names to produce premium content sites within Medium itself, such as Bill Simmon’s The Ringer and The Cauldron, a sports publication produced in collaboration with Sports Illustrated.

As its popularity has grown, the company has also begun to attract larger publishers, such as the Washington Post and The New Yorker, as well as brands and businesses, and now offers specialised services for both. Organisations in certain fields, such as Free Code Camp, a non-profit which offers free coding training, have even found the platform so useful at building engagement that they have abandoned their onsite blog altogether.

How Your School Can Set Up a Medium Account

Medium’s publishing platform employs a simple, easy-to-use ‘what you see is what you get’ editor that allows content creators to easily add headlines, images, and video:

The resulting posts are pristine and simple, with plenty of white space and room for customisation. Each post contains an estimated reading time in the sub-headline, and social sharing buttons for both Facebook and Twitter at the foot of the article.

Example: This post from Bentley University is a good example of a how a typical Medium page is laid out. You’ll notice in the left hand corner that Medium have judged the article as a ‘5 minute read.’

What really makes Medium’s platform special, however, is how users interact with content. Any time a reader clicks the heart icon, which is similar to Facebook’s like button, that story is automatically shared in the reading lists and email digests of that user’s followers. For schools, this means dramatically increasing the potential reach and visibility of your posts among prospective students’ peers.

Example: This post from Gettysburg College, which was published in Medium’s The Coffeelicous publication, attracted 96 recommendations. From that base, the school’s Head of Communications and Marketing Paul Redfern said the post amassed over 8,400 organic views.

Reader’s comments, known as responses, have also been supercharged to maximise user experience and shareability. Each Response is its own unique Medium page, and users can attach tags, comments and even recommend them as standalone stories. Your audience can respond at the end of the article or highlight any part of the text and respond specifically to that section. They also have the option of sending private notes to the author. This creates a whole new world of engagement possibilities for your digital student recruitment content.

Example: Below is an excerpt of some of the responses to an article by Oxford University News entitled “The Future of Work.” Notice that the second comment is a response to a specific sentence in the piece that the reader has highlighted.

Readers can also simply highlight any part of an article they feel is interesting and striking, and popular highlights are shared on user’s feeds every day. They also show up when new readers access your story, hopefully making it more scannable and directing them to its most important parts. The feature is incredibly popular and widely used on the platform, meaning that making sure your writing is striking and quotable is a must for schools hoping to maximise Medium’s potential.

Publisher or Writer? Which is Better for Schools?

There are two ways to set your school’s account up on Medium. You can simply set up a single account as a writer, or create your own Medium publication. The latter is probably more attractive to schools for a number of reasons. Firstly, your school will get its own won custom domain name on the site, and can also tailor the page layout as you see fit, incorporating your own logo, background images and navigation menu. Secondly, having your own publication means you can have a wider range of different writers contributing. Schools can publish articles from well-known faculty members, feature contributions from different departments, and even invite students to share stories on their publication, making it more engaging and likely to capture the attention of the Medium audience.

Example: Santa Clara University’s Medium publication features contributions from official university channels, faculty, and students.

But while this approach has its advantages, it could be argued that schools who enter the Medium fray as publishers rather than writers are failing to utilise the potential of the site as a viral engine. Medium is full of a wide range of publications with dedicated, highly educated fanbases, and schools who post articles as writers have the freedom to contact these established publications and contribute to them, potentially finding a much wider audience.

Example: Gettysburg College frequently contribute to a number of different publications. The post below was featured in Student Voices, a publication which collects students’ stories from a variety of contributors, and the perfect choice for a school using Medium to gain exposure.

With the platform is still in its early days, it’s difficult to say which approach is best for gaining traction, and the schools currently using Medium are fairly evenly split between publishers and individual account holders. It may an idea to maintain your own publication, but periodically contribute posts to others to increase your exposure, effectively giving you the best of both worlds.

The Best Thing About Using Medium for Student Recruitment Content? Analytics

Another huge advantage Medium offers for schools is a detailed analytics dashboard. Under the Stats page, both individual writers and publishers can view the total time users have spent reading on all their stories over the last 30 days:

You can also view previous months by clicking a simple link, and the screen also includes a graph of stats from your individual stories. Medium offers four extremely useful metrics for measuring the reach of individual stories:

Views- The number of users who have clicked on your post.

Reads- An estimate of how many users have read the post all the way through, based on the estimated reading time Medium has assigned it.

Read Ratio- The percentage of users who read the story in full after clicking on it.

Recommends- The amount of recommends a story has received from Medium users.

These values offer incredible opportunities to drive improvements in your content strategy for student recruitment. Armed with an estimate of how many prospective students are actually reading your content all the way through, you can get a sense of what kind of content they really find engaging. You might find that your best performing posts use plenty of visuals, address topical subject matter, or are just written particularly well, and seek to replicate those qualities in future posts.

Being able to compare your amount of Recommends to your Views and Reads is also quite useful in estimating the ROI you are getting from your Medium content: You can see how many views each recommend is worth, as well as how many fully read the story, which may indicate a seriously interested lead. This will help you refine and target your content more effectively.

In addition the these values, Medium also displays a Story Movement Graph for each post, which will show you when your article is being viewed and help you estimate the shelf life of your content. Even more importantly, clicking on the ‘Referrers’ tab will allow you to view a complete list of URLs and other services which sent traffic towards your story:

Schools that opt to set up their own custom domain publication on Medium also have the option of adding their Google Analytics ID to the site by filling out a simple form. However, it should be noted that there currently some limitations to the site’s GA integration, and your reporting will not track users who access your posts through the Medium app, or through RSS or Instant Articles.

Student Recruitment Content Strategies for Medium

At its most basic level, the principles behind creating successful content for Medium aren’t much different from the best practices you should already be employing in your higher education content marketing. Strategic keyword integration, relevant links back to your website, and other common SEO elements can all be used to good effect on the site, with calls to action carrying particular importance in turning casual readers of your posts on the site into genuine leads.

Example: The University of Northampton does a great job of creating strategically targeted posts which prospective students casually browsing Medium will come across.

This article, from a student blogger, which highlights the social aspect of university life, ends on a great CTA which encourages readers to visit the school’s site:

Where Medium differs from other digital channels is the type of content that gets noticed. The site, at least among its early adopters, is seen as something of an antidote to the bite-sized, lighter posts which tend do well on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Medium readers come to the site to read, and favour long-form articles with real substance that demonstrate thought leadership.

With that in mind, it might make sense to consider using the site as a place to amplify and share your more education-focused content which might not be suited to other digital channels, such as news on research and other academic topics. Having said that, timeliness is also crucial in getting your post to spread through Medium, so focusing on current events is also a good strategy.

Example: Boston University’s page takes a very research-oriented approach to the content it develops for Medium, often inviting their faculty to contribute to the site, but also tackles subject matter which is interesting and relevant for casual readers.

If you are importing content from your website to Medium or cross-posting on both at the same time, it’s important to use Medium’s official migration and import tools and WordPress plugin, rather than simply copying and pasting the text. These tools will automatically add your own website as the canonical link for the Medium version of the post, helping you to avoid any SEO penalties for duplicate content.

Once you have published content on Medium, push notifications will sent to all of your followers, and the article will also appear in Medium’s daily digest emails. However, you can also amplify the reach of your posts by sharing them on other social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin. Because of the site’s links to Twitter, any content you post will automatically be shared among your Twitter followers, provided you sign in using your official school account. In addition, Medium offers a paid promotion service for branded stories, with payments calculated using the site’s Total Time Read metric.

While Medium continues to grow all the time, it’s worth noting that the platform is still very much developing. In essence, it still functions very much like a start-up, and the company are constantly tweaking the site and introducing new features to make it more appealing. In addition, the company’s revenue model isn’t exactly set in stone yet. The site only introduced promoted stories and a paid subscription option for publishers earlier this year, and still features no other advertisements, although this could change as time goes on. Schools wishing to get the most out of the platform may need to work hard to stay up to date with developments.

In addition, while many publishers and writers have taken the leap to using Medium as the sole platform for their blog content, the site’s long-term viability is unproven, and schools should be cautious about devoting too much attention to it at the expense of other digital channels.

Nonetheless, it does have the potential to play an important role in a wider content marketing strategy, helping you to reach a highly coveted ,well-educated demographic of readers you might not otherwise be able to access. And once you establish your presence on the site, the detailed analytics Medium offers for your posts will give you a good sense of what kind of ROI the platform is delivering for your school, and help you determine just how worthwhile it is.

Has your school tried Medium Yet? Leave a comment below and tell us about your experiences on the site!

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/medium-higher-ed-content-marketing-game-changer/feed0How to Continuously Improve your School’s Website with Evolutionary Redesignhttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/website-evolutionary-redesign
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/website-evolutionary-redesign#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2016 14:28:13 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=19135]]>Higher education websites are both vitally important to a school’s success and very easy to get wrong. With so many academic departments and inner colleges to represent, diverse audiences to cater to and objectives to accomplish, making a website that satisfies all types of users on all types of devices is a tall challenge indeed. In addition to these essential requirements, universities are eager to establish a distinctive brand that conveys that they’re progressive, inclusive and cool (among many other attributes).

When institution leaders eventually decide that their existing sites aren’t doing the job, the sheer size and complexity of higher ed websites make redesigns a huge undertaking. They have significant up-front costs and implementation times, frequently going over budget and taking longer than expected. The worst part is that when the expensive new site is finally unveiled, colleges risk finding that their traffic has dropped precipitously or that they’re facing a backlash from irate users.

Although not strictly website related, attempted logo rebrands from the University of California and Trinity College were recently brought back to the drawing board after passionate rejections from their respective communities. True website success is measured by more subtle means – analytics data will reveal detailed page views, conversions and bounce rates and it can take weeks or months to objectively assess whether a website is performing as desired.

There are many reasons why traffic may drop following a redesign – because SEO was not effectively implemented into the redesign process, the new site didn’t undergo sufficient internal testing, users are confused by the new navigation or the overall design simply doesn’t satisfy user needs.

Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary Redesigns

Traditional website redesigns feature a revolutionary “out with the old, in with the new” approach, often focused on implementing trendy aesthetics based on subjective assumptions. University leaders and creative agencies tend to underestimate the risk of revolutionary redesigns, gambling that adopting a beautiful look and incorporating established “best practices” will automatically achieve expected gains.

The big problem is that these sweeping changes risk alienating your community by typically ignoring or minimizing user feedback and analytics, and are relatively irrevocable once the new design is live. Even if new pages are increasing conversions, it’s difficult to identify which of the simultaneous changes are responsible for these improvements.

That’s why more and more organizations are favouring evolutionary redesigns, minimizing these kinds of risks by making structured, incremental improvements that are continuously tested and optimized. Time and resource commitment is then spread out over time because the website is always evolving.

While radical redesigns can be necessary to replace long outdated websites, a more ideal approach is to continuously improve the user experience by applying A/B testing to evaluate each successive design update. For instance, Princeton University has long been working on a major redesign that they intend to launch this fall after having the same basic design for eight years:

“Since 2008, our site has had the same basic design,” writes Dan Day about the project. “We won’t wait another eight years to redesign. Once we put up the new version, we’ll start work on improving it and do so continuously week after week, month after month, year after year.”

Continuous improvement is part of their new vision, in recognition that the site’s users are constantly changing and even the expectations of return visitors continue to evolve with the times. Universities are far from static so why should their websites be? Princeton lists dozens of meetings their design team has had with campus groups, noting that these interactions won’t stop after the site launches because “continuous improvement means continuous collaboration.”

A Better Approach to Website Redesign: Always Evolving

It doesn’t make sense to focus on your most important communications and recruitment platform only once every five years. Instead of launching and leaving, more organizations are opting to keep developing, testing and refining their websites. Higher education sites seem particularly well suited to this approach, limiting frustrations from diverse stakeholders by rolling out a series of small improvements while retaining overall stability, letting users become accustomed to new aspects one at a time.

It’s a strategy utilized by the biggest internet sites – Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. – quietly forgoing big redesigns in favour of continual changes that can be tested and implemented so fluidly that users rarely notice. eBay actually once tried switching their formerly bright yellow background to white in a sudden change but the influx of complaints forced them to change it back. Instead of conceding defeat, they gradually modified the background colour, shade by shade over several months until the yellow was finally gone. Hardly anyone noticed this time.

When planning any redesign, it’s best to focus on goals you wish to achieve with your website rather than everything that’s perceived wrong with the existing design. Evaluate the content of your most visited pages (using Google Analytics), before considering a deeper content audit of a few dozen others deemed important for your marketing efforts. At this point, the goal is just to determine whether your content reflects what’s best about your school.

Is your content doing what it’s supposed to – effectively informing and inspiring targeted traffic, integrating optimal keywords, and driving conversions? Is it true to your school? It is appealingly designed for readability with a good font size, paragraphs, sub-headings, images and videos? Strive to thoroughly understand what users expect from your site and their navigation path to fulfilling these goals. When considering changes to your higher education web development, keep in mind that users tend to care less about aesthetic design elements than being able to easily complete their tasks.

Here are three key SEO considerations for changing content:

Integrate 301 redirects to pass search engine rankings and users from the old page to a similar new page

Be cautious about changing internal links in your site’s architecture

Understand which keywords and topics have the best ROI and traffic potential, so you maintain priority keywords in title tag, header tags, body copy and alt text, and don’t remove pages targeting those keywords

The A/B’s of Testing Everything

Regular A/B testing is at the heart of evolutionary design, measuring two or more options in a controlled environment according to the behaviour of real users to reveal the will of the people. For example, if changing the colour of a Call-to-Action button yields 20% more clicks then the data has spoken. Absolutely everything in your digital marketing can be tested for best results but to realize the greatest redesign gains, focus first on testing elements that will most impact user experience and conversions. These include new initiatives or pages that have yet to be optimized, high traffic or strategically important pages, and poorly performing pages with low conversions and high bounce rates.

Some organizations start with qualitative usability testing, surveying users for feedback or observing a test group’s interaction with their websites. This strategy calls for asking users to perform specific tasks, encouraging them to talk aloud as they navigate your site, and asking general preference questions. Qualitative analysis is a great way to generate ideas for testing. It may be done with various redesign possibilities to help reveal the optimal version as well as identify potential design flaws that were previously overlooked.

However, experimenting with design variations through A/B or multivariate testing is a more representative data-driven approach to confirm hypotheses and reduce redesign risks. This optimization strategy involves splitting your web traffic so each visitor sees either your current version (the control group) or one or more variations. Specific performance metrics are tracked to determine which version delivers higher conversion rates.

Multivariate testing compares combinations of varied attributes to measure how two or more dimensions of a design interact with each other to determine a design’s success. This type of testing generally takes longer to retrieve statistically significant results and is more complex to fully comprehend.

A/B design variations may differ in only one element (e.g. changing an image for a video or changing the colour of a button) or in many elements at once (e.g. changing an entire page layout). Switching seemingly obscure elements can sometimes create surprisingly significant differences that generate more student inquiries, providing data-driven evidence to justify seemingly subjective design decisions.

Example: When Khan Academy introduced a “sneak peek” preview feature into some of their online lessons, user response was mixed. They decided to measure user preferences by running a 50/50 test on their site for a week with half of users seeing the preview features and half not. The graph below shows that the “no sneak peek” version converted at a rate nearly 30% higher than the one including the new feature.

Creating a Digital Marketing Experimentation Culture

A robust higher education analytics system seeks to measure both micro conversions or indicators that demonstrate prospects are completing their intermediate tasks (secondary website goals), and the more macro conversions that provide a truer picture of how well your primary goals are being accomplished. Once key conversion metrics have been determined, seek to identify specific pages, features or functions that are underperforming and choose a conversion-related element to redesign.

There are many online tools available to conduct A/B testing, including Google Content Experiments (a free service allowing testing of up to 10 versions of a single page but requires designing and coding variations), Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. Never stop testing small but frequent changes, establishing a calendar for rolling out new updates and an efficient process between designer and analyst to continuously measure results. Keep in mind that these results can be puzzling so look at many different metrics to deduce which change really happened. Also consider results of various user segments such as first-time visitors, particular geographic regions or certain student personas for design preference insights of prioritized demographics.

Some tests will deliver inconclusive results and some changes will work better in the long-term than the short-term because of general change aversion, seasonality or other factors. By maintaining an ongoing record of previously run tests you can go back to promising ideas and re-run tests, perhaps with tiny adjustments, to different results. General preferences will inevitably evolve over time but with smaller incremental updates it’s easy to reverse inaccurate interpretations of testing results.

Final Testing Considerations

When implementing design changes, don’t disregard other performance data like page load times that can strongly influence website effectiveness. Every revised page and design element should be thoroughly tested on as many devices and browsers as possible.

It’s sometimes preferable to target test to one segment, filtering out international traffic, mobile users or desktop users, for example. An A/B test’s “winner” should only be determined when there is high confidence in the results (usually a 90-95% chance of being accurate) with sufficient data and test duration to account for natural variations over time.

While iteratively changing and testing plays an important role in continuous improvement, know when and when not to use A/B tests. Strategic shifts involving new initiatives or organizational direction can’t be adequately tested in this manner, however you could employ a “smoke test” in which you release to a small user segment for a short time to predict outcomes.

Although big changes are more likely to yield larger conversion gains, it’s recommended for teams less experienced with testing to start with smaller elements that can be listed and prioritized. As you begin recognizing trends in your testing data, you’ll develop greater confidence in your understanding of the needs and expectations of your users. This shouldn’t prevent continued objective experimentation but it will give you a better idea of what to test and which variations are more likely to improve return on investment.

Has your school experimented with A/B testing on its website? What have been your biggest conversion gains or surprises?

Universities around the world are ramping up their international student advertizing and promotional efforts. As an international student recruiter, staying ahead of trends and knowing how to stay relevant is key when attracting the coveted student sector. Housing Anywhere, a new online platform for student housing solutions can help you do just that.

Interested in learning more about Housing Anywhere? Read on to discover what this new online platform is, its services, and how it can benefit your student recruitment efforts.

Housing Anywhere Connects International Students with University Lodging

The concept of Housing Anywhere was coined in 2009 by a student named Niels van Deuren, who had the idea while embarking to Singapore for an exchange program. During his frustrating search for accommodation, van Deuren realized there was a wide gap in the market for an effective international student housing solution.

What originated as way for students to sublet their rentals has grown into a widely used platform in 53 countries and 484 cities. With 100,708 listings to date, Housing Anywhere has flourished on a global scale with listings in cities like Berlin, Mexico City, and Sydney. Not only does Housing Anywhere serve the needs of students around the world, but it also keeps the recruitment needs of universities top of mind.

As van Deuren says, “The majority of universities we are talking to are keen to grow their international student numbers. Our focus is to help these universities support their current and future international growth ambitions by increasing the amount of rooms available.”

Housing Anywhere makes it easy for students to explore housing options to find a place that suits them

Housing Anywhere’s Services Streamline the Process of Matching Students to Residences

Users can safely search for accommodations using filters that narrow search results by price, type of dwelling, and locations on the Housing Anywhere website. This service is beneficial to not only incoming international students, but also outgoing students. Housing Anywhere lets current students at your university rent out their rooms to incoming international students you have recruited. In addition to student-made listings, listings can be created by residences, locals, and property owners. Once the landlord’s property becomes verified, the listing goes live and students can view it.

Niels van Deuren explains what makes his platform so different from others, “Platforms like Airbnb’s focus on tourism; short stay rentals ranging between 2 days and 2 weeks. We focus on stays of 1 or 2 semesters, and thus provide additional services that are specifically tailored to international students—such as help with rental contracts, live support on the website and a dedicated student care team to answer any questions.”

By partnering with Housing Anywhere you can take advantage of the platform’s University model. With three different plans, Activation, Complete, and Premium, you can choose which is best for your university’s targets. The Activation plan is designed for smaller universities and includes a range of basic features, such as customer care services, online promotion, secure booking services, and more. Universities can choose to upgrade to the Complete or Premium plans to gain access to ambassador programs, university feature pages, coupon codes, and beyond. All plans are designed to benefit your student recruitment efforts.

Benefits of Housing Anywhere For Your International Student Recruitment Department

As global international student recruitment efforts grow more intense, universities need to adapt their strategies. By introducing Housing Anywhere into your recruitment tactics you can take advantage of the platform’s benefits which will help you compete in the global marketplace.

Many university housing departments struggle with finding enough accommodations for students. In addition, university departments often use excessive labour hours finding incoming students appropriate accommodations. Housing Anywhere takes the pressure off of these departments so they can focus on students who may require specialized attention for meeting their housing needs, while giving autonomy to international students to browse the website for themselves.

Housing Anywhere will help bring new international students to your university

If you partner with Housing Anywhere and purchase one of the company’s plans, you will receive promotional space on its website. With over one million student hits on the website per year, this new exposure could bring in substantial amounts of new leads. That’s not the only benefit of partnership van Deuren explains, “The students of our partner universities have priority access to newly listed rooms, plus have a dedicated student care team at their disposal; thereby reducing the workload of the International Office.”

As the international student market continues to grow, it’s likely you’ll see more and more institutions developing multi-lingual websites. Offering alternate language versions of your site can give you a valuable advantage when it comes to attracting recruits, making the application process easier for them by presenting everything they need to know in their native tongue, and making them feel more welcomed and included in your wider school community.

Unfortunately, multi-lingual web development is rarely a simple process. A number of things have the potential to go wrong, and a quick search of the current multi-language offerings from schools on the web is still likely to reveal a whole host of errors with site architecture, translation, and design. It’s not that these sites have been developed badly or unprofessionally, it’s just that building a multi-lingual website is a massive undertaking, and it can be easy to overlook certain small factors that can undo all your good work.

If you’ve been thinking of developing a multi-lingual website to attract more international recruits, here are a few crucial things take into account before you get started.

Before you begin such a huge project, it’s important to have a solid plan of action in place. First, of all, your school will need to carefully consider what languages it would like to offer its website in. While offering as many languages as possible is always a plus, the process of building a multi-lingual website can take a lot of time and resources. Other elements of multi-lingual websites can be also quite problematic, and the extra care and effort involved can mean that it’s more feasible for schools to target just a few specific regions or countries at first.

In addition, depending on your school’s aims and target audience, it may not be necessary to translate absolutely every page of your site. Many schools develop smaller microsites or subdomains for international student recruitment, highlighting only relevant programs and information. Not only is this approach more efficient and cost-effective, but it can also result in a much more intuitive end user experience for international recruits, as they can easily find the information they need with getting lost navigating through irrelevant pages.

While scaling down your efforts might seem counter-intuitive, it is often the best approach in the long run. Having a small number of alternate language offerings which are presented well will make a much better impression on prospective students that vast amounts of poorly designed content, making it more likely that your multi-lingual site will actually generate more student inquiries. And provided you have well-researched and crafted target personas for your international students, a strategy that focuses on your most high potential markets can still help you make connections that count.

When you’re developing a website for more than one language, your layout should be designed with that in mind. Every element of the alternate language site needs to translatable, and needs a responsive and dynamic structure that will make this possible.

One mistake many sites still make, for instance, is using images with embedded text. Embedded text can be complicated to translate as it requires a completely new image file to be designed, and these images are often missed altogether when developers create alternate language sites. Not only does this look unprofessional, but it can make it harder for prospective students to find valuable information. An easy way to avoid this is to overlay your text onto graphics to make it easier to translate along with the rest of your content. Navigation elements, such as drop-down menus, buttons, and any other clickable elements of your site structure also need to built to translate easily.

Example: CultureWorks overlay text onto the scrolling image slideshow of their homepage, making it easy to translate into alternate languages.

Another layout element that can cause problems when building multilingual websites is the size of your text, both in menu buttons and navigation bars, and in the body text of the page itself. Since different languages take up different amounts of space, it’s important to use a responsive user interface (UI) that allows different components of your page to expand and contract when necessary, and ensure the text fits correctly.

Example: Comparing the English and Russian versions of the ILSC Language Schools website, you can see that the site employs a responsive design to align its menu buttons with the size of the text.

Aside from making the layout easier to translate, it’s also important to consider the disparity of internet speeds in different countries, as that can have an impact in what elements you choose to incorporate into your web design. While internet penetration and quality is improving all the time, this snapshot from Akamai Technologies State of the Internet 2015 report shows that speed still varies greatly from country to country, sometimes with surprising results:

With that in mind, it’s important that your design isn’t overly complex, and will still be easy for students in your targeted countries and regions to access. For example, a school in Ireland looking to recruit in Brazil needs to keep in mind that a design that works perfectly well in their country would be much, much slower to their targeted students. While it’s natural to want your website to look as impressive as possible, you might find that, when dealing with international markets, it sometimes just isn’t practical.

Once you’ve finished your multi-lingual website, how will you let users choose which version of your site they see? While this might sound like a simple enough question, there are actually a number of different options schools can choose from when constructing a language navigation menu. They can be presented as a dropdown menu, or displayed as a navigation bar on your homepage if you have enough space. Another option is to use a dedicated landing page to direct users to their native language site before they arrive on your homepage.

While many websites use flags to represent different languages, it can prove problematic, particularly when using languages that are spoken throughout the world. A Spanish speaker from Latin America, for instance, might have difficulty recognising a Spanish flag. Presenting the name of each language in text- and written in that language- makes it much less confusing for the user.

Example: Destination Canada’s multi-language website features both flags and text in their language menu, making it easy for the user to find the right version of the site for them.

It’s also possible to automatically detect the language of a prospective student through their browser or the location of their IP address in order to present your site in their preferred language. This can be a useful way to highlight your alternate language website from the outset, provided you present them with an option to switch languages if they would prefer. Presenting users with the same page they were viewing when they switch languages is also important, as many multi-lingual websites redirect to the home page when languages are changed, which can be frustrating for prospective students.

4. Typography is Crucial When Translating Student Recruitment Content

The typographic layout and fonts you use for your website can make a big difference to how intuitive it is international users. Languages such as Russian, Greek, Chinese, and countless others in Eastern Asia are all written using special characters that aren’t necessarily supported by all kinds of fonts, so you should ensure your website uses a Unicode font, which contain a wide range of different characters for different languages. You can find a useful list of those here.

In addition, it’s also important to carefully consider your font size, as certain languages need to use larger text than others to make them readable. For instance, the complexity of Chinese characters can make them difficult to see properly in a small font size.

Example: Compare the English and Chinese versions of the CATS Education homepage here. While the school have made their font large enough for the Chinese characters to be readable, you can still see how much more complex the characters are when compared to Latin text.

5. Other Complications in Multi-Lingual Web Development for Schools

Certain other languages can also cause complications with your design. Thai and Lao are generally written without spaces between words, meaning schools targeting these countries need to review text carefully and add line breaks in appropriate places to ensure the text remains properly aligned and doesn’t run off the page.

Even more difficulties can be created when developing a site in Middle Eastern languages, such as Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew, which are read from right to left rather than left to right. In this case it’s often necessary to create a mirror image version of the entire layout your site, in order to ensure the script flows correctly and make the experience more intuitive for prospective students.

Example: The Hebrew version of Technion Israel Institute of Technology’s website is presented from right to left, with the entire layout mirroring the English version.

As you can see, multi-lingual web development for schools isn’t an easy process, but there’s no reason to be discouraged. While it’s not an easy task, a well-designed multilingual website has the potential to become the cornerstone of your international student recruitment strategy, increasing your lead generation and engagement in strategically important regions and more than justifying the time and effort. And by using professional services and keeping these important factors in mind, you can ensure that the alternate language sites you create for your school avoid some the biggest potential pitfalls, and deliver multilingual offerings that make a real impact to your recruitment initiatives.

Does your school offer any multi-lingual content? What challenges has developing content in different languages presented for you? Tell us about your experiences in the comments section!

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-important-factors-developing-multi-lingual-websites-international-student-recruitment/feed0How to Leverage your Faculty for Domestic and International Student Recruitmenthttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/leverage-faculty-student-recruitment
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/leverage-faculty-student-recruitment#commentsWed, 09 Nov 2016 16:00:52 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=19049]]>With an ever increasing number of institutions chasing a shrinking pool of prospective applicants, most schools are actively on the lookout for both new enrolment markets throughout the world and new recruitment strategies for reaching and converting potential students. Mobilizing the talents of some of your most credible messengers – your faculty – can strongly influence prospective students’ perception of your college or university and their decision to apply.

“It takes a campus to recruit, and once you get students here, to retain them through graduation,” said Cynthia Worthen, vice president for academic affairs at Argosy University, in a conference call with Dean & Provost. Successfully enlisting the support of your greatest brand ambassadors requires a comprehensive strategic plan for working towards common goals and the development of resources for targeted recruitment initiatives.

To overcome potential reluctance among faculty for assuming additional responsibilities, admissions teams should effectively communicate why their help is valuable and offer a range of options for how they can get involved (here’s a helpful checklist used by W. Kent Barnds of Augustana College).

Establishing one-on-one connections with prospective students is a challenging but impactful activity – fortunately there are numerous implementation strategies and digital resources available to maximize your student recruitment opportunities.

Defining Recruitment Goals and Strategies for Faculty Participation

Student enrolment is a complex and collaborative process requiring clear direction from institutional leadership and input from faculty and other stakeholders. Proactive, long-term planning is a prerequisite for implementing enrolment strategies and sustainable internationalization – a key priority for many schools seeking to expand admissions numbers and campus diversity.

Effective strategic planning for enrolment builds on existing strengths and evidence-based aspirations to determine optimal growth and diversity targets. Analyze market research, current enrolment demographics and input from the broader campus community to better understand student preferences and particular geographic regions to target. A committee involving representatives from all segments of your community can help provide meaningful insights and encourage shared participation in progressing toward defined goals.

Strive for transparency in communicating enrolment objectives and assessing implementation measures, integrating feedback into documents, emails and meetings. Sharing enrolment data and tuition revenue for each department with all faculty members can motivate those with lower numbers to increase recruitment efforts. Some colleges are considering allocating departmental funds by student enrolment, which could provide a direct incentive for department-wide recruitment participation (or risk faculty revolt).

Evaluate your options for potential brand ambassadors by reaching out to relevant faculty to express your intentions for getting new student referrals, domestically and abroad, soliciting their assistance in leveraging their personal and professional networks. Those who respond with enthusiasm make natural candidates to follow up with.

Example: In response to steadily declining recruitment numbers, the University of Northern British Columbia’s (UNBC) president Daniel J. Weeks repositioned the enrolment services team last June, announcing that student recruitment and retention would be placed “squarely in the centre of a senior portfolio, coupled with a new spirit of cross-departmental collaboration.”

The message commended UNBC’s “outstanding” faculty while implicitly asking for their support, mobilizing all recruitment resources to meet enrolment targets and noting the effectiveness of making personal calls to accepted students when encouraging them to register. This type of message not only sets the stage for further recruitment collaboration, but also conveys the university’s enrolment pressures while sharing responsibility for admissions successes and failures.

Mobilizing Faculty Support for Student Recruitment

“Professors hold a key role in recruiting students, especially at private colleges and small public institutions,” asserts Professor Stephen M. Winzenburg of Grand View College where the admissions director reports that 85% of visiting students request a meeting with a faculty member. The resulting personal connection often “seals the deal.”

“It is part of our jobs to set aside a small amount of time to meet potential students and showcase the academic programs that we have worked so hard to build,” says Winzenburg. “We need to make sure we treat potential students the same way we would want colleagues at other institutions to treat our own children.”

Partnering with faculty for student recruitment is a recognition that admissions is an extension of faculty. For faculty to play a vital role in any institution’s vision for growth, they must firstly agree with this vision and feel their contributions are valued. Some departments may feel they already have more students than they can effectively serve so would have little motivation in participating in the very activity that would add to their work load. Beyond satisfactorily addressing these concerns, there are many factors which may motivate or hinder their participation.

“By becoming a recruiter and a person who encouraged yield, I have some control over who I have in the classroom,” says W. Todd Roberson, a senior lecturer of finance at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Kelley School of Business who has assumed responsibility for coordinating recruitment and “yield” strategies for his academic unit.

Faculty at other schools have also noted that recruiting the best students provides a more meaningful teaching experience. Roberson recommends prioritizing professors with more practical real-world experience rather than those “academically qualified”, soliciting support by appealing to their empathy, excitement about their discipline, and their egos. He ends one-on-one conversations with prospective students by offering his business card and the call-to-action “Visit me on campus.”

Planning How Your Faculty Can Become Involved in Student Recruitment

Throughout regular communications with your best faculty recruiters, plan around their teaching schedules and campus events that they can attend. Consider your more international and traveling faculty for opportunities where they might coordinate their schedules with recruitment fairs and meetings with prospective students abroad. Clarify that they aren’t necessarily expected to “sell” the school but rather accompany admissions officials to discuss their research, academic passion and recent student outcomes.

“Faculty can tell the story about their experience in the classroom, students they have had, how they transformed the students and prepared them for life after school,” suggests Dr. Benjamin Akande, who was dean of the George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University at the time, and is now President of Westminster College. The working adults that formed the vast majority of his student base valued the specific information that only faculty could provide.

While interaction with faculty can make or break a prospect’s enrolment decision, a strategic approach is necessary to integrate this valuable resource with other recruitment efforts and to ensure each meeting is as fulfilling as possible for both sides. Before asking for specific involvement, be clear about your expectations and be respectful about their time. It’s only logical that faculty will be more eager to recruit if they’re appropriately incentivized to do so.

“Time is (the) currency faculty trade in and they like having freedom,” says Roberson, recommending that colleges consider granting release time in exchange for service. Some schools include outreach activities in the professor’s annual review while others reward notable participants with a monetary award or small gifts.

Aligning Faculty with Student Engagement Opportunities

Once a preliminary coalition of the willing has been assembled, admissions directors could begin to align their faculty resources with on-campus, off-campus and digital recruitment opportunities. W. Kent Barnds recommends providing guidance, not direction, when presenting options for involvement, respecting that not every professor will feel comfortable making phone calls or permitting visits to a class in session.

While segmented drip marketing campaigns are an effective automated initiative for new prospects, those who request further information could be invited to complete a student interest form to facilitate customized follow-up. Faculty could then support admissions staff in contacting accepted applicants and prospects who have demonstrated active interest through phone calls, emails and in-person meetings.

Providing templates and content guidelines to professors can help focus their conversations and letters in sharing their unique perspectives about their field, mentioning notable achievements and potential advantages of choosing their program. Letters could reference impressive student information, emphasize important aspects of the program, illustrate career possibilities and recent student success stories, and end with a handwritten note such as “hope to see you on campus.”

To accommodate prospective students seeking to discuss a particular program of interest in person, schools like Western Carolina University have designated one faculty member to serve as admissions liaison for each department. Some colleges encourage prospective students to visit faculty during office hours, join classes with current students or even attend mock lectures that appeal to popular interests and are led by particularly charismatic profs. Arranging faculty to meet with small groups of 10 to 15 prospects is an effective and efficient initiative, especially if students are provided with lists of relevant questions to get the ball rolling.

Involving Faculty with Digital Marketing Recruitment Initiatives

Besides personalized prospect following up via email, telephone or letter, involving faculty in other online student recruitment can showcase your top brand ambassadors, resolve potential concerns and better explain various programs of study. For instance, try giving departments autonomy over their own social media accounts to share their passion, compelling images, videos and program-specific points of interest while organizing all accounts with a management platform like Hootsuite and providing clear policies for ensuring a coherent presence and protecting the college’s reputation.

Invite your faculty to contribute blog posts about their field of expertise, experience and interests in a relatable way that would appeal to future students. Integrating these posts with other general or student blogs on your website will better connect them with your brand and make them easily findable. It’s ideal to edit these submissions to incorporate blogging best practices, including SEO techniques and breaking up text for easier scanning with subheadings, images and videos. Of course, these should subsequently be shared on social media.

Example: Berkeley University cleverly frames its faculty blogs as “Campus scholars’ perspectives on topical issues – in conversation with you.” This makes for more engaging reading and distinguishes the faculty (and by extension, the school) as opinionated and progressive.

Example: Another strategy is to have your dedicated blog writers interview faculty experts as Rhodes Wellness College does. This ensures fully optimized content and an objective perspective into subject matter of interest to readers.

Leveraging Faculty in International Student Recruitment

Webcasts, video conferencing and other digital communications like Skype are valuable ways for faculty to follow up with prospects, and may be the only viable method for communicating with those living farther away. Consider how your more international professors might host online chat sessions for students and parents in the native language of top source countries.

Making a virtual campus tour on a higher ed mobile app is another exciting idea for enabling international students to explore your offerings at their convenience, and involving students or faculty in the narration adds an authentic touch. Encourage your professors from diverse cultural backgrounds to contribute to improving your international digital content, sharing their experience about cultural communities on campus and assisting with web content in other languages.

Some schools involve professors in hosting social nights in their native language, giving some students a chance to communicate in the language of their home country and others a chance to practice learning a new language. Be sure to make these special events more visible for international student recruitment by highlighting them in your social media.

Attempt to leverage your international faculty to meet with groups of students or prospects on or off-campus about immigration or working visa information, or how they can stay in your country following graduation. In recruitment fairs abroad, clarify university and location information, existing student clubs and communities relevant to the particular culture, career and internship advice, and procedures for immigration.

Expanding the Circle and Closing the Loop

The more that you can involve faculty in recruiting and retaining students, the better. Establishing functional channels to encourage an effective communication flow between faculty and admissions teams can be challenging but mutually empowering. A good place to start may be to conduct a focus group with faculty members who are going through the college search process with their own children, to better understand their experiences and assess their willingness for becoming more involved with recruitment.

Analyze the success of faculty recruitment efforts with your campus information system to properly recognize and reward each member’s support, tracking individual contacts and meetings on the path to enrolment. Professors want to know that their participation is worthwhile and closing the loop with an annual summary to illustrate the results emphasizes that their time matters while providing an opportunity to discuss future improvements.

Which methods have you found most successful for involving faculty in student recruitment? How has your experience been?

We’re excited to announce that Higher Education Marketing will be hosting a FREE 30-minute webinar for education marketing and admissions professionals entitled Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Student Recruitment Campaigns with Google Analytics on Thursday November 17th at 11:00 am Eastern time.

Google Analytics has become an integral part of digital marketing, providing professionals with more insight than ever before into the impact, reach, and effectiveness of their online campaigns. But is your institution getting the most out of its analytics management? Have you set Goals for every conversion milestone you want to measure? How often do you consult GA to measure your performance, and what actions do you take to refine and improve your campaigns?

Unlocking the Full Potential of Google Analytics in Online Student Recruitment

This webinar will demonstrate how, with just a few hours of work a week, online student recruitment professionals can use Google Analytics to drive continuous improvement in their campaigns, increasing lead generation, targeting prospective students more effectively, and seeing more accurate and measurable results. Using common examples from the education sector, we’ll demonstrate how you can optimise every aspect if your GA process, including:

Creating an effective GA management plan

GA basics: Setting up and optimizing accounts

Getting real value from goals and conversion tracking

Linking Webmaster Tools and Adwords to GA

Tracking campaigns

Navigating and interpreting GA reports

Measuring your results

Optimizing for continuous improvement

Whether you’re just getting started with Google Analytics or looking to build on your existing knowledge, this webcast is will be ideal for admissions managers, marketing staff, and any other recruitment professionals looking to see better results from their digital recruitment initiatives.

Want to Take Your Google Analytics Management to the Next Level?

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/education-marketing-blog/dont-free-webinar-maximizing-effectiveness-student-recruitment-campaigns-google-analytics/feed05 Winning Recruitment Content ‘Angles’ for Language Schoolshttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-winning-recruitment-content-angles-language-schools
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-winning-recruitment-content-angles-language-schools#commentsWed, 02 Nov 2016 13:53:14 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=19018]]>The student recruitment challenges faced by language schools are unique. Language education can attract students from a wide variety different places and cultures, each with different ambitions, interests, and tastes. With such a broad spectrum to cover, it can be a challenge figuring out how to develop a content strategy that really appeals to your prospective audience base.

Things become even more complicated when you consider that your prospective applicants have limited language proficiency, meaning that any content you produce should preferably be simple, visual, and easily translatable to facilitate multi-language campaigns.

So what’s the key to quality language school content? In this blog, we take a look at a few possible angles to approach your content creation from that could help your posts resonate with a much wider audience.

1. Using Student-Generated Content Gives Prospective Students Content They Can Connect With

Legendary marketing guru Philip Kotler once said that ‘the best advertising is done by satisfied customers,’ and the statement holds true even in highly specialised fields like online student recruitment for language schools. One of the simplest yet most effective ways of really connecting with prospective students is to include student-generated content featuring current and past students from their country or region. Seeing someone who was once in the same position as they are now, with a similar culture and background, achieving their goals with your school’s help can resonate with prospective students in a powerful way, and help build trust and confidence in your brand.

Example: The University of Washington use student testimonials to promote their International & English Language Programs, asking international alumni to comment on their experiences and share their favourite memories from their time on the course.

Student-generated content can take many forms, including guest blogs, student diaries, or even videos. It’s also extremely versatile, and can be repurposed on social media, in email lead nurturing campaigns, and a number of different areas of your website, as well as in printed promotional materials. Your current and past students are usually more than happy to provide glowing references, and the diverse student body of many language schools means you’re likely to be able to source content that speaks to different audiences in a number of regions around the world.

Example: For really impactful content, why not consider filming student testimonials and incorporating them into a video about your school? KAI Japanese language school did just that, and the results speak for themselves. You’ll notice that the video includes people speaking in both English and Japanese with closed captions available, and students from Italy, Switzerland, and Canada, demonstrating the wide range of voices language schools can incorporate into their content.

When they begin searching for language schools online, prospective students are often confronted with a myriad of possible study destinations, particularly when looking to study widely spoken languages such as English and Spanish. As a result, it’s important for schools looking to recruit more students online to do all they can to play up the unique selling points of their location, emphasising what makes it special and convincing potential leads that it would make the ideal new home for them.

After all, while their education is likely to be the primary motivation of a student looking to study on a language program abroad, many are also excited to experience new places, people, and cultures. Your goal should be to paint a picture of your home country or city as a great place to live, highlighting cultural attractions, fun things to do, and other great experiences students can look forward to.

Example: ONCAMPUS Global run pathway programs for international students at a number of Universities in the UK. Posts like this one, which details some of the tourist attractions near their campuses, are a great way of getting prospective applicants excited to enroll on their courses.

Focusing on your location is also an ideal way to create great visual content. Try posting photos of local scenery on your website, or on visually oriented social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. If you have time, you might even consider shooting a video tour of the area for prospective students. Visual content generally attracts high amounts of engagement on the web, and best of all for language schools, it’s universally understood, meaning students from all your targeted regions will find it easy to engage with.

Example: This video from Camino Barcelona makes excellent use of its home city, featuring some beautiful evocative shots of the architecture and beaches.

3. How Educational Content Can Help You Generate New Leads

Today’s internet users value informative, useful content, and language school students are no different. Both prospective and current students will probably expect your blog and other online channels to include some educational content, and posts offering helpful resources to improve their language skills can be a great way of promoting your services.

Many language schools include blogs explaining common phrases or slang terms, or lists of tips to make studying easier. If done well, this sort of content can be a great way of building confidence in your teaching methods, and prospective students who learn something, however small, from browsing your website are far more likely to make a serious inquiry.

Example: Destination Canada, a summer English language camp for high school students, offers loads of useful advice for ESL learners on its website, like the below infographic. Simple and highly visual, infographics can be a great way to present content so language school audiences can easily understand it.

Remember, educational content doesn’t have to be dry and serious. Try thinking of interesting and fun ways students can improve their language skills, and create posts around them. For instance, you could post a blog about movies or TV shows students could watch in your language, or an infographic highlighting activities that can improve their skills. When you put your mind to it, you’ll be amazed at what you can come up with.

Example: This blog post from CultureWorks, another Canadian ESL provider, takes the novel approach of suggesting word-based board games students can use to improve their language skills.

4. Use Your Content to Highlight the Potential Rewards of Studying at Your Language School

Another important aspect of attracting prospective language school students is convincing them of the benefits of learning a new language. Many potential applicants will see it as the key to improving their career prospects, and opening up new opportunities for them around the world. Posts which highlight the potential rewards of your programs will give them concrete reasons to pursue their goals, and strengthen their resolve to make their ambition a reality.

Example: The American Association of Teachers of French of Rhode Island (AATFRI) composed a series of videos promoting the benefits of learning French. In this one, a successful international relations professional talks about how it has helped him in his career.

To stand out from the crowd, it’s also important to promote the more specific benefits of your language school programs. Whether you’re offering language learning for the workplace, daily use, or for academic purposes, emphasising a specific niche will help you focus your online marketing more effectively, making you more likely to attract leads that fit your profile.

Example: This post from the English Studies Institute, which is based at University of California at Berkeley, does a great job of positioning their Intensive English program as the ideal route to working and studying in the USA.

5. Showcase Your School’s Community and Social Events

While many prospective students will be excited to come to your school, it’s important to remember that they may also be apprehensive too. Coming to a strange country and being far away from your family and friends can be daunting, and it’s only natural for students to be worried about adjusting to a new culture, fitting in, and making new friends.

Promoting some of the extracurricular activities and social events you offer at your school can be a great way to allay some those fears, showing the sense of community your school provides for students and the family-like atmosphere that can develop among them.

Example: This video of a Thanksgiving meal at LUMOS Language School in Salt Lake City offers a glimpse into what student life is like there, showing the community atmosphere the school provides and really giving prospective students a sense that they will be entering into a caring, supportive environment.

Photos, video, and other content centred on extracurricular activities at your school are also perfect fodder for social media marketing for schools, providing you with a steady stream of posts that will give prospective students a real sense of your school’s personality and culture.

Example: Inlingua Victoria, an ESL school in British Columbia, regularly post snapshots of student life on their campus and social events on their Facebook page.

While it’s important to create posts built around a range of different topics, each of these angles offer a great starting point to approach your content from when you’re looking to generate ideas. Not only that, but they can be applied to almost any type of content format across a number of digital channels, including your website, blog, and social media pages. They can even be translated into different languages in order to appeal to a wider range of students.

Best of all though, they each communicate a clear message that speaks to universal concerns of language students at all levels around the world, meaning you can be sure your content will really hit home with your target audience.

Working for language school? What kind of content marketing approaches have worked best for you in the past? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-winning-recruitment-content-angles-language-schools/feed1Beyond Responsive: How to Give Prospective Students a Fast and Frictionless Mobile Experiencehttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/beyond-responsive-fast-frictionless-mobile
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/beyond-responsive-fast-frictionless-mobile#commentsWed, 26 Oct 2016 13:49:46 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=19006]]>Have you pulled up your school’s website and application on your phone recently? The foundation for all digital marketing activities is a user-friendly and responsive website, which is why a majority of education institutions have spent the last few years focusing on optimizing their sites to attract prospects from around the world and to be easily accessible on any device.

It should come as no surprise that prospective students expect a frictionless online experience. With four of five respondents to a recent Chegg survey visiting college websites via mobile devices and a significant proportion of global prospects applying to schools from their phones, delivering an excellent experience to the growing number of mobile users has become an absolute necessity.

When Algoma University proudly launched its 100% mobile-responsive website this past summer, it summarized the fundamental shift that the industry is responding to in how people access web content. “We need to ensure the content is presented in a format that is appealing and efficient for our audience,” said the school’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Brent Krmpotich. “We have seen a steady rise in the number of people visiting our website on mobile devices. This is especially true of prospective students, over 70 per cent of students entering our site through the future student’s portal are on mobile devices.”

While building a mobile-friendly website is an important response to the numerous potential applicants using mobile and tablet devices to research and interact with universities, it should be viewed as only a first step in shifting to a truly mobile mindset. When prospects struggle to find desired information online, they are less likely to apply to an institution. To keep them from moving on to the next school on their list, you must ensure their first interaction with your brand is responsive, relevant, actionable and frictionless.

Simplifying the Mobile Experience with Intuitive Navigation

Mobile optimization involves much more than making information fit onto a smaller screen – content must also be rewarding, easy to navigate and quickly accessible. While mobile devices have become a central part of everyday life for most people in today’s society, this is particularly true for the college demographic, with more than 7 in 10 checking their devices at least a few times an hour and 22% checking every few minutes.

Although responsive design tends to be implemented under the assumption that users will act similarly independent of the device they’re using, accessing the internet from a handheld tool is a greatly different experience than on desktop. Portable devices are likelier to be used in distracting environments that inhibit the amount of information that can be effectively communicated. Mobile users are generally more objective-oriented, seeking specific information and therefore less interested in peripheral design elements that may enhance desktop versions.

By properly understanding your mobile users’ preferences and behaviour, you can deliver a more intuitive and productive experience. Dig into your education analytics data and persona research to determine which types of searches are bringing users on different devices to your site and which searches they’re performing when they get there. Look for trends in content accessed and shared on phones and analyze the typical path that mobile-using prospects follow.

There is a strong inverse correlation between conversion rate and load time

Are there ways to use auto-fill or buttons to reduce the need for tedious typing on smaller devices? Can interaction be improved by providing clearer options, prioritizing information, eliminating unnecessary functions and reducing complexity? An effective navigation and search bar is particularly important for content-heavy higher education mobile sites. Help users accomplish their goals by providing a direct route to easily clickable calls to action, automatically shortening forms for mobile users with Smart Content, and keeping typography clear and concise – Typecast has a helpful guide for improving your responsive site’s font size proportions.

Delivering a Faster Mobile Experience for Student Recruitment

An important yet frequently underappreciated aspect of delivering an effective mobile experience is site speed optimization. Getting your mobile website to load faster can improve your search engine rankings and lead to significant conversion gains. Studies have found that over 44% of users navigate away from websites taking longer than 3 seconds to load and pages that are one second faster experience a 27% increase in conversion rate. There are obviously many factors influencing conversion and bounce rates but it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of website speed in perceptions of your online presence.

Example: Franklin University has been commended for having an unusually fast (93/100) and interactive mobile site, particularly for students transferring credits from other schools.

When accessing a school’s website, the user’s mobile device needs to retrieve diverse information, often from different hosts, such as images, videos, carousels, social plugins, ad tracking, and analytics scripts. Switching to a managed WordPress hosting provider is the easiest first step to immediate speed improvements. To quickly know whether your host could be a problem, try entering your domain into Google PageSpeed Insights and see if ‘Server response time’ is one of the issues raised.

For more actionable analysis, the Pingdom Speed Test Tool is recommended for evaluating both your site’s speed and size, identifying the biggest files slowing down your load times. Large images are often the reason for overly bulky sites and a great starting point in making your site faster. Although beautiful, high-resolution images are an appealing way to illustrate and summarize marketing messages, they take longer to load than normal text so require special considerations.

Actionable Strategies for Improving Mobile Website Speed

1. Optimize images

Begin by ensuring the images you choose to upload are impactful and clear on the smaller screen. Optimize all images with resizing, cropping and compression (ideally under 100kb) in an editing program before loading them into WordPress, saving them in a relatively lightweight format like JPG. Strive to create images at the exact required pixel size of your theme. WP Smush is a powerful and free WordPress plugin for reducing image file size, and other tools like W3 Total Cache can also help with download speed.

GT Metrix is another helpful tool that will analyze your site to specifically list all images needing optimization. It even optimizes them for you but you’ll have to download them and replace your existing images. Both Pingdom and GT Metrix can also tell you how many external JavaScript files your site is loading.

2. Minimize external scripts and plugins

Having too many external scripts and plugins is a common cause of slow websites. Remove any plugins you don’t need and consider disabling the ones you use only occasionally, adding them later when you need them. For example, analytics can be done outside of WordPress instead of with a plugin and many plugins tend to only be used once but remain on your server. Commonly problematic plugins include premium plugins with encrypted code, re-direct plugins and those with many database queries like “related post”.

Assess content and features loaded from other sites to identify external scripts you can do without. Common external scripts include plugins for live chat, social media buttons, social sharing and external commenting; analytics services, external font scripts and video embedding. Integrating strategic features can add real value to your website but others may be expendable in exchange for a major site speed improvement. Further improve your speed by having your web developer remove unnecessary characters, especially JavaScript, from your mobile website’s code.

Videos tend to be the longest files to load on mobile. Consider removing videos that don’t contribute to the user experience or hiding them in the background by inserting some CSS into the code. Alternately, you could use a CTA that sends a video to the user’s email instead of having it directly on the website, or set your video scripts to load asynchronously, after your page has already loaded.

3. Clear out old baggage

As websites naturally accumulate content over time, it makes sense to do a big cleaning once in a while or even re-do your site’s theme from scratch with a more minimal code. This is one way to remove excess code, databases, backups, themes and other unnecessary baggage that slows sites down. You can eliminate old comments, trackbacks and unused installations while moving selected media files to external storage locations.

4. Optimize high traffic pages

Speeding up your site for education lead generation often involves finding a compromise with competing priorities like design and functionality. One way of maintaining cool but potentially site-slowing elements while delivering a positive first impression is focusing efforts on your most popular pages like your homepage and other key landing pages that impact conversions.

You can simply make these pages smaller by including less overall content, such as excerpts instead of full posts. Other strategies include moving signups to their own dedicated pages, avoiding poorly coded scripts that overload sliders with images, and moving resource-heavy scripts and plugins to other pages whenever possible.

Example: The University of Calgary started with mobile to completely redesign the Future Students section of its website, to make it faster and easier to navigate. Acknowledging the confusing structure of typical data-heavy university sites, it uses an innovative backend database to filter and present only relevant information depending on their province/country of origin, program and special requirements for their area of interest.

“The process of selecting and applying for a university can be very complex, so we started by mapping the complete functional and emotional journey of a future student as they select both a university and a program,” says Peter Hartl, the university’s lead for this initiative. Prospective students can now perform a simple keyword search, explore programs of study compatible with their personality traits, or browse all programs while comparing multiple options side by side.

Will You Make Your Mobile Webpages AMP-Powered?

Google has been working towards improving the mobile experience with its algorithm changes that reward mobile-friendly sites with higher rankings and now its open-source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMPs are separate stripped-down versions of mobile webpages, streamlining website code and serving pages from Google’s high-performance global servers so pages will load lightning-fast wherever you are.

Initially focused on news stories from online publishers, AMP pages may be relevant for education institutions and other content providers as they gain in popularity. By caching AMP files in the cloud and establishing a technical core between pages, AMPs with a lightning bolt logo will appear at the top of mobile search results in a carousel format. Websites on WordPress now automatically support AMP while those self-hosted can install a plugin but it may require some additional IT coordination.

Adopting the new initiative could expand the reach of your content, however, it creates potential analytics challenges and could impact your site traffic because AMP links point to Google.com URLs. While providing instant access and greater visibility to content makes AMP an appealing option, it remains to be seen whether education institutions will AMP their webpages. The future of AMP depends on whether it becomes widely adopted as a mobile standard.

Conclusions

Higher education websites, especially mobile sites, are where prospective students first interact with your brand and form their first impressions. As your virtual front door, they have enormous reputational impact and engage more people than any other online student recruitment activity, including a vast majority of international prospects. Ensuring your online visitors reach their destinations as quickly and easily as possible should be a top priority for every institution.

While Asia has long been a top priority for international recruiters, large markets such as China and India have often tended to overshadow other countries on the continent. Of the other potential regions for targeted recruitment initiatives, Southeast Asia is perhaps the most valuable, with over 300,000 students from the region currently studying overseas. And with many countries currently experiencing unprecedented economic growth, the importance of establishing a presence in Southeast Asia for schools is only going to become greater.

Southeast Asia comprises eleven different countries with a combined population of 600 million people. Although there are five major language families in the region, there are several regional and local dialects and variations of each. The Philippines, for instance, is home to over 182 spoken languages.

With such incredible diversity, it would be unwise to attempt to adopt a homogenous strategy for recruitment in Southeast Asia. Instead, schools need to carefully consider which countries are likely to hold the greatest potential return for them, and develop personalised and targeted campaigns that speak directly to the values, motivations, and cultural identities of local prospective students.

Read on to learn more about some of the most important growth markets in Southeast Asia for schools right now, and how you can maximise your visibility among potential leads in the region.

The Digital Landscape of Southeast Asia: A Guide for Schools

The good news for recruitment professionals looking to gain a foothold in Southeast Asia is that the digital landscape of the region is far more familiar looking than other parts of the continent. Where schools looking to reach students in places like China, South Korea, and the Middle East have sometimes had to deal with unfamiliar search engines and social media platforms due to government restrictions and local popularity, most countries in Southeast Asia are dominated by globally popular sites.

Google is the most popular search engine in the region, with a market share of over 90% in many of the most populous countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and The Philippines. Social media usage is largely driven by western platforms too, with the only notable difference being that Facebook is even more dominant in the region than in other countries. We Are Social’s Digital, Social & Mobile in Southeast Asia in 2015 report revealed that an incredible 232 million- or 92%- of Southeast Asia’s 252 million internet users were active on Facebook:

In addition, unlike many other regions where Facebook is losing its popularity among millennials, the site is extremely popular among younger demographics in Southeast Asia, with over 70% of users under the age of 30. The social media landscape is evolving, however, with some chat apps such as LINE and Viber beginning to gain popularity in specific countries.

While recruiters won’t necessarily have to deal with the blanket bans that have been imposed on many western sites in countries like China and Russia, government censorship of the internet in Southeast Asia can occasionally be an issue, and schools do need to tread carefully when posting content.

The Malaysian government has blocked sites it felt carried unfavourable content in the past, while Thailand’s government is working on a single internet gateway which will allow them to control the availability of content online. Indonesia has also made some controversial censorship decisions, becoming the first country to ban video streaming service Netflix after deeming its content unsuitable. Overall, however, Southeast Asia offers a reasonably friendly market for digital student recruitment, and schools at every level should have few problems engaging with prospective students online.

Indonesia: A Key Growth Market for International Student Recruitment

The most populous country in the region- and third largest in Asia- Indonesia offers many potential opportunities for schools. The country’s middle class is expected to double by 2020 according to recent findings by the Boston Consulting Group, while McKinsey & Company estimate that it will become the world’s 7th largest economy by 2030.

However, the country’s education system, which has historically been underfunded, is struggling to keep up with demand. In a recent report, the World Bank stressed the need for a more educated workforce, warning that, “without the right skills of youth, the growing demand for higher quality products and services may be met by importing them rather than increasing the value added to Indonesian firms.”

While the Indonesian government has recently increased its investment in higher education, many Indonesian students are turning to institutions abroad for opportunities. The country is among one of the fastest growing markets in the US, where the number of Indonesian students grew by 14% between 2009 and 2014. UNESCO data also places Indonesia among the top 10 countries for students seeking study in the Netherlands, and the 6th biggest in Australia, which is traditionally the most popular destination for Indonesian students, and currently hosts over 8,000 Indonesians across all tertiary levels.

While the majority of Indonesian students enroll in undergraduate study abroad, many also seek postgraduate opportunities after completing a bachelor’s degree at home, with some Indonesian firms even sponsoring employees to go abroad for further study. Like many other international markets, Indonesian students are most likely to be drawn to STEM subjects. In the US, for instance, this sector accounts for 31.8% of students, and schools looking to appeal to the Indonesian market may find that promoting STEM programs dramatically increases engagement from Indonesian students.

Example: The University of Kent’s admissions page for Indonesian students promotes its STEM foundation courses as a pathway to study.

Although Indonesian students are generally very community-minded, and value the presence of people from their own culture when choosing a study destination, they also demonstrate a marked desire to expand their horizons. The popularity of the Netherlands among Indonesian students is due to the ease at which they can obtain work visas to remain in the country after graduating, while a recent study by QS Digital Solutions also revealed that Indonesian students place a high value on the opportunity to build a global network while studying abroad, with 34% of those surveyed listing it as a top priority. Recruiters looking to gain a foothold in the country can appeal to this sensibility by promoting the multicultural nature of their campus, programs, and events.

Example: York University’s multicultural work features a range of events that highlights the diversity of its student population. As you can see from the booklet below, this includes things like cross-cultural workshops, which would likely appeal to the mindset of Indonesian students seeking to build a global network.

Why Everyone from Language Schools to Community Colleges Can Find Value in Vietnam

Like Indonesia, Vietnam has a booming economy and growing middle class, but is already a far bigger market for international student recruitment, with Grok Education Services predicting that the number of Vietnamese students studying abroad will exceed 400,000 in the next decade.

Vietnam is also unique among Southeast Asian countries in that students tend to favour North American institutions over Australian and European options. The United States in particular has cultivated ties with the country, and there are currently over 18,000 Vietnamese students in the USA.

However, while the middle class in Vietnam is growing, affordability is still a huge factor. The per capita GDP is still below $7,000, and many students seeking study opportunities abroad are also likely to seek scholarships or financial aid.

Interestingly, many Vietnamese students in the US opt for community colleges as a more affordable alternative to universities, and the country is currently the single largest supplier of international students in this sector, with over 6,000 students. Vietnamese students tend to favour business and finance courses, which many of these smaller schools can offer, making it an ideal fit for both parties. As a result, the country provides a unique proposition for institutions that are often somewhat shut out of the international recruitment market.

Example: Green River Community College developed a Vietnamese language version of their website for prospective students, underlining the strategic importance of the country to their recruitment efforts.

Vietnam also offers major opportunities for ESL education, with language school students making up around 20% of the country’s total international student contingent. Producing a Vietnamese version of your site and running geo-targeted PPC campaigns in the country could be extremely worthwhile for institutions working in this sector.

Example: Destination Canada, a language camp for high school level students in Ontario, also offers a Vietnamese version of their site. The school has been careful to translate every element of its site, including things like data capture form fields, which can be vital to creating an intuitive user experience for international students.

Recruiting in Thailand: Opportunities and Obstacles

Another potentially huge market for language schools is Thailand. While the country possesses a growing middle class, it remains among the lowest ranked countries in the Education First English Proficiency Index. Thai students seeking to study at colleges and universities abroad are likely to require a short-term English course or pathway program to bring their skills up to the standard required.

Example: Academic pathway programs like those offered by CultureWorks in Canada could prove popular with Thai students, as many may require additional language training before entering university.

Despite this barrier to enrolment, Thailand has a highly mobile student population, and UNESCO figures showed around 27,000 Thai students studying abroad last year, with the USA, UK, Japan, and Malaysia among the top study destinations, while China is also becoming increasingly popular.

Much of the drive towards studying abroad in Thailand is fueled by the perceived poor standard of tertiary education at a domestic level. The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Competitiveness Report ranked the country 87th in education at all levels, down nine places from the previous year, despite ranking 31st in overall competiveness, underscoring how the sector has failed to keep pace with the country’s development.

Schools looking to recruit in Thailand should keep in mind that, like many other Southeast Asian societies, students are likely to come from heavily family oriented backgrounds, with parents playing a crucial role in the decision-making process. Including content that speaks directly to parental concerns and motivations as well as students will be helpful in attracting Thai students.

Example: The University of Nottingham, which has a strong presence across Asia, includes plenty of information targeted specifically towards parents on its website. This can be very helpful in appealing to the family oriented mindset of countries like Thailand.

Recent Developments in Education in Malaysia and Implications for Student Recruitment

Of all the countries in the region, the educational landscape of Malaysia is perhaps the most fascinating. It is unique in not only being a large market for students looking to study abroad, but also a popular destination for international students in itself.

An extremely multicultural country, the Malaysian government has invested heavily in recent years to make its higher education system more competitive, and the reputation of universities such as Universiti Malaya and Universiti Putra Malaysia have grown significantly, with the former in particular now viewed as one of the best in the region.

The government’s Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025, unveiled last year, outlines aims to improve the country’s performance in both university rankings and research, as well as to attract over 250,000 international students. The country has also struck up strategic partnerships with some western universities, most notably the University of Nottingham and Australia’s Monash University, to set up campuses in the country in a bid to attract more international students.

Example: Melbourne’s Monash University was one of the first international universities to set up a campus in Malaysia. Around one third of their 6,000 students are international, showing the growing attractiveness of the country as a study destination.

As a result, Malaysia has now established itself as a popular destination for students from other countries in Southeast Asia, where it offers a more familiar culture and environment than western alternatives. It has also become popular in Australia, partially due to a government initiative known as the New Colombo Plan, which encourages Australian students to partake in semesters abroad in the Indo-Pacific region.

This increased investment and focus on education from the government has made it more difficult for schools outside the region to attract Malaysian students. Around 30% of Malaysian students currently studying abroad receive some form of government scholarship, and as the country looks to incentivize their citizens to study locally, there are fears that the options available to those wishing to study abroad may dwindle. As it stands, the Malaysian government only offer scholarships to study in institutions ranked among the top 200 worldwide.

Nonetheless, schools may still find some joy in targeting self-funded students. Malaysian students have had a high level of mobility over the past few decades, and a number of English-speaking countries are well-established in the region, particularly the UK and Australia. As a result, graduates with international degrees are still highly sought after by Malaysian employers. Postgraduate programs, in particular, represent an extremely attractive option for Malaysian students, with many seeking further study after completing a domestic undergraduate program in order to enhance their career prospects.

Example: The University of Sheffield provides partial scholarships to both undergraduate and postgraduate Malaysian students, greatly increasing its chances of continuing to attract students from the country, even as their domestic education options improve.

Other Markets & New Developments in Education in Southeast Asia

Recruiters for all types of schools may also find a number of different opportunities to generate more student inquiries in other countries within the region. Like Malaysia, Singapore has established itself as both a major supplier of international students and an attractive study destination. Other high to middle-income countries like Brunei and the Philippines also boast a highly mobile and well-educated student population which may be attractive to potential recruiters.

In addition, many traditionally lower-income countries in the region are quickly growing and expanding, giving rise to new demand for international education opportunities. Myanmar, for instance, has seen tremendous growth as an international recruitment market recently, with radical change in both the social and technological landscape increasing the mobility of the student population. The country is a good example of how quickly things are evolving in the region, and why schools should make an effort to keep up with the latest developments.

With so much diversity throughout Southeast Asia, there is no hard and fast rule as to which countries schools should target their recruitment efforts towards, and much will depend on the nature of your school, your resources, and current reputation and links in the region. Recruiters should take time to research the market extensively in order to get results, reviewing their competitor’s activities in order to benchmark their performance and maximise their potential return.

Have you done any work recruiting in Southeast Asia? Which countries have you targeted, and what tactics have you found useful in your campaigns? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below!

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/emerging-markets-tactics-international-student-recruitment-southeast-asia/feed05 Incredibly Useful Ways to Engage Prospective Students with Storifyhttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-incredibly-ways-engage-perspective-students-storify
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-incredibly-ways-engage-perspective-students-storify#commentsWed, 12 Oct 2016 14:14:14 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=18964]]>Curated content -posts which collect and share content from a range of different sources- has long been one of the most underrated elements of the content marketing mix. Curated posts can attract a lot of user engagement, and are used by a wide range of media outlets to present social media posts, articles, or other content which relate to a specific topic in a single concise, digestible format. Not only that, but they can be put together easily and quickly, shared across a wide range of platforms, and be optimized to maximise their SEO value.

One of the most popular tools for content curation is Storify, which combines a number of efficient search tools with an intuitive user interface to make the process easier. The platform, which is now owned by Adobe, was first launched in 2010 and has gone on to amass around 23 million unique monthly visitors. Content produced on Storify can be shared on your own page on the site, or embedded onto any publishing platform that supports html, such as WordPress.

A number of schools already use the platform for creating posts around various topics, but what kind of curated content is most likely to engage prospective students? Read on to find out a number of ways to use Storify in your online recruitment initiatives.

1. Storify Can Help You Maximise Student Engagement from Open Days

One of the best and most direct ways of using Storify to connect and engage with potential recruits is to build posts around recruitment related events such as open days, campus tours, and fairs. Visitors to your school are bound to share their experience on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and countless other social media platforms. Collecting the best posts on Storify and publishing them on your school’s website will remind prospects who attended just how much they enjoyed their experience, as well as showing other prospective applicants what they missed out on.

Example: The University of Tampa created a Storify post around their Open House events and embedded it in the admissions section on their website, even making the post available as a slideshow for easy viewing.

The content was curated by searching for social media posts which utilized their #UTOpenHouse hashtag, and includes a good mix of posts from different platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.

Perhaps the best part about promoting open days using Storify is that the platform can automatically send notifications to anyone whose social media posts are included in the story. This means that prospective leads whose posts you’ve included- and who likely already have a positive view of your school- will be alerted of the article directly, making them far more likely to view it and strengthening their connection with your institution.

To maximise their education lead generation potential, open day Storify posts should be put together quickly following your event. You should also consider linking to your admissions pages within the body text of your post, perhaps even including information about other upcoming recruitment activities.

Example: The University of Reading regularly creates Storify posts about their open days. The school are always sure to let readers know when the next one is happening at the end of the post, as well as providing links for prospective students who want to book campus tours.

2. Highlight Your Accepted Students’ Delight on Social Media to Generate New Leads

Another brilliant way to use Storify get prospective students excited about applying to your school is build Storify posts around new enrollments. Seeing peers who are excited to attend your school will reinforce a positive image of your brand among your target audience and encouraging them to pursue their interest further.

For instance, after you send out your offers of admission, you could create a post from the reactions of applicants on social media. For best results, try and encourage your faculty, different departments, and current students to get involved too, taking the time to post on their social media accounts to welcome the new members of their school community. This will ensure a wide variety of quality posts from a range of sources.

Example: Brown University created this Storify post around the admissions offers for the class of 2019. As you can see, they have chosen a good mix of Tweets that include students, their loved ones, and organisations from the wider school community.

Of course, each country’s admissions system is different, but your school can still find ways of creating Storify posts around the process. In the UK for instance, where applicants are admitted based on their UCAS results, many schools create similar posts around the time results are released and offers are finalised.

Example: The University of Birmingham composed a Storify around 2016 A Level Results day. The school used their #hellobrum hashtag to source posts.

3. Give Prospective Students an Inside Look at What Their First Few Weeks at Your School Will Be Like

New students can continue to provide plenty of material for Storify posts as they prepare to enter your school. Move-in days, orientation weeks, and other events that take place on campuses around the world each year are all bound to generate plenty of social media activity. The enthusiasm that new students express when starting their course will ensure plenty of positivity, while events like these will resonate heavily with prospective applicants, who can look at these posts and begin to picture themselves in the same position next year.

Example: Rice University curated an excellent Storify post around their 2016 orientation week, which drew on a range of different social media sites to create an eclectic collection of posts, photos and videos.

Including student tweets, Instagram posts and other social media snippets based around the reactions to events like these can be very effective, but you should also consider including more informative content. Collecting blog posts, guides, and other material which is relevant to new arrivals can lend your post a bit more substance, providing help for new students viewing the post as well as additional information which might interest potential applicants.

Example: York University’s Housing Services page includes a Storify post which collects a number of blog posts from the department and current students, each of which feature handy tips for incoming students about choosing your accommodation and preparing to make the move.

4. Create Posts Around Special Events to Show Potential Applicants What They’re Missing

Throughout the academic year, there are bound to be a whole slew of events that will attract serious engagement from your school community online. Everything from social events, to graduation ceremonies, and even academic conferences are all ripe for creating Storify posts that will resonate with potential leads. An academic events like a conference, for instance, can be presented ‘as it happened’ allowing interested readers to catch up on what they missed.

Example: The University of Nottingham created a post a round the faculty of Social Science’s EU Referendum debate in April of this year. The post presented some of the key talking points in order to give readers a full picture of the debate as a whole.

While more informal, socially oriented events can take a more casual approach than this, following a narrative structure can still be useful, helping to make the post flow better for readers. Again, including posts from a range of sites, and in a variety of formats, is also vital to ensure you appeal to the broadest audience possible.

Example: This Storify post documenting the University of Braford’s end of year Game Day adopts a fun, causal tone which perfectly suits the subject, while also featuring a wide variety of colorful posts from different sources.

5. Use Storify To Highlight Newsworthy Events At Your School

Storify can also provide you to with a way to take advantage of publicity generated by noteworthy happenings around your school. Whether it’s a new research innovation, the opening of a new building or facility, or even the success of an alumnus, any news which attracts widespread attention for your school can raise awareness and give you a valuable visibility boost that will help you generate quality student leads.

Example: Cardiff University took advantage of Storify when the 2014 Research Excellence Framework rankings, which evaluate the research of UK universities, placed it in the top 5 for the first time. An improvement in your placement in university rankings can provide a great fillip to schools, and Storify posts are just one way to capitalise on it.

Of course, not every school will have events that capture mass media or social media attention like this. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the platform isn’t for you. Many schools regularly use it to curate roundups and ‘best-of’ posts which collate any notable blogs posts, social stories, and other items that might interest potential leads. Posts like these can be created on an annual, monthly or even weekly basis depending on how much material you have, and are a great way for institutions of any size, from large universities to small community colleges, to shine a fresh light on their recent progress and celebrate how far they’ve come.

Example: This post created by Centre College provides readers with a review of some of the most notable posts the school has made in the previous year, which include academic highlights, sporting achievements and special events.

With so many different options to choose from, you can how valuable a role Storify and curated content could potentially play in your student recruitment content strategy. The platform has built-in blogging capabilities, and you can search for content from its database by targeting specific search terms. Many schools use branded hashtags for this purpose, although trying a few different terms can be useful, as it will give you results from more diverse sources. For best results, adding your own narrative text which incorporates strategic linked keywords is also advisable, as it will help to boost the SEO performance of your posts. This will contribute to maximising the visibility of your Storify content and turning it into an important part of your overall content marketing strategy.

Have you created Storify posts for your school? What types of content do you find work best on the platform? Leave a comment below and tell us about your experiences.

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-incredibly-ways-engage-perspective-students-storify/feed0Generating New Leads from Old Content: 4 Great Ways to Repurpose Your School’s Existing Postshttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/increase-schools-content-output-find-repurpose-higher-education-content-marketing-material-give-posts-life-online
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/increase-schools-content-output-find-repurpose-higher-education-content-marketing-material-give-posts-life-online#commentsWed, 05 Oct 2016 13:24:47 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=18949]]>At this stage, the majority of recruitment professionals are probably well aware of the importance of content marketing to their overall digital marketing strategy. Content has long been arguably the single most important factor in improving SEO, brand awareness and conversions on the web, with Hubspot’s The State of Inbound 2016 report revealing that marketers who focus on blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI.

Unfortunately, content is also the most labour intensive part of an inbound marketing initiative. Schools looking to maximise their visibility on the web need to ensure they post frequently on their own site, create unique content for different social media channels, and promote everything they post to ensure they generate views, all of which can put them under a lot of time pressure, particularly in smaller institutions without dedicated content creation staff.

Repurposing can provide schools with a way to get more out of their best content. By updating and reformatting old posts, schools can reach new audiences, save on time and effort, and still create content that feels fresh, new, and unique.

If you feel that you haven’t gotten the most out of some of your better posts in the past, read on to find out how to recycle them in new formats to attract more leads.

1. Update Your ‘Evergreen Content’ to Connect With New Leads

Quality content doesn’t need to have a limited shelf-life. While striving to create topical, newsworthy posts should be an important part of any higher education content marketing strategy, content with more universal appeal can continue to generate interest long after it has been published. Marketing professionals refer to these kinds of posts as ‘evergreen content.’

‘Evergreen’ topics tend to have a fairly broad appeal. A good example in the student recruitment sector would be general information about admissions deadlines, financing, or accommodation, which prove useful to students year after year. Blog posts, videos, and other content built around these sorts of areas can be reused again and again, each time helping generate a new group of perspective students.

However, simply reposting the original content offer should be avoided where possible. Duplicated content can harm your SEO, so tweaking the post in some way is necessary. One option is to update the post to take into account any new developments in the area. This will ensure that your content is up to date and correct for prospective students, while also creating a unique page for SEO purposes.

Example: The University of Michigan reposted this blog, originally written for applicants on their 2015 waitlist, earlier this year. However, the post has been updated to reflect the 2016 enrollment cycle so that it provides students with the correct information.

This strategy can be extremely valuable and applied to a number of different types of recruitment content, such as introductory posts about courses and programs, study tips, and even posts about campus social activities. Nonetheless, it should be approached with caution. Reposting old content frequently won’t reflect well on your school, while you should also choose what you reuse carefully, picking only posts which attracted a high amount of engagement when they were first published.

2. Give Your Real-Time Recruitment Content a Second Life on Video

Social media content has become increasingly disposable in recent years, with platforms like Snapchat and Periscope using time-limited, disappearing content as a unique selling point. While millennials have bought into a more real-time social experience, it can be frustrating for marketers, who often find that their best work reaches the end of its cycle without reaching half as many people as it might be capable of.

Fortunately, these sort of ‘self-destructing’ posts can be a given a second life, and in one of the most engaging and desirable formats around. Many schools have found considerable success repurposing content like Snapchat Stories on YouTube, allowing prospective students to catch up on what they’ve missed while ensuring the content lasts.

Example: The University of Florida regularly posts videos of its Snapchat Stories on YouTube, like this one featuring a takeover from a graduating student. This tactic can attract more potential and current students to both platforms.

Live streaming has also become very popular over the past year, with the use of features like Facebook Live and Periscope on Twitter becoming more widespread among users. Many schools have made use of the technology by broadcasting special events, webinars and live Q&As over social media. This can be a great way of attracting and engaging new students, providing them with a unique content offer and giving a valuable short-term boost your school. However, when the event is over, you’re left with great content that many not have reached every student it potentially could. Preserving your live streams on YouTube can be a great way of maximising their reach.

Example: This online Q&A with a University of Washington student originally aired live on the school’s Periscope channel, but they reposted on YouTube afterwards to make it available for anyone who had missed it.

If you’re turning content like this into a video, it’s a good idea to edit it where possible, trimming out any unnecessary delays, mistakes, or footage that isn’t useful or interesting. If you have a particularly long clip, you might consider producing a shortened version, highlighting the best parts and providing a more streamlined video that will hold the user’s attention.

3. Making Slideshares from Popular Recruitment Content Can Provide a Valuable SEO Boost

Repurposing blog posts and articles into different formats can also prove beneficial. While long-form content ranks well with search engines, and can be very appealing to some prospective students, others favour shorter, more digestible information with visuals to long, text-heavy articles. Reformatting your posts can allow you to have the best of both worlds.

One of the most underrated tools for this is Slideshare. Dubbed ‘the quiet giant of content marketing’ by Forbes, the presentation sharing site, which is owned by LinkedIn, attracts around 70 million unique monthly visitors. 80% of those come through targeted search, as Google tends to rank Slideshare content highly in results, due to its unique combination of heavily visual content with lots of indexable text.

While Slideshare is generally more prevalent in B2B marketing, recruiters can easily make use of it to generate more student inquiries. Blog content can be turned into slides by breaking down the key points of your articles, and can be done using basic software like Powerpoint. Many schools are already present on the site, often using it to post presentations relating to academic content.

However, given the SEO advantages the site offers, it perhaps more effective for more recruitment-focused content, which can allow you to take full advantage of Slideshare’s lead generation potential to gain more visibility in strategic searches.

Example: The University of Southern Queensland focuses heavily on recruitment in their Slideshares. Since search engines favour Slideshare content, presentations like this stand a great chance of increasing the school’s organic reach.

4. Make Your Recruitment Content More Accessible By Creating Infographics

Another way of turning blogs into a more visual format is to create infographics. Infographics also tend to rank well with search engines, and their easily scannable, visually attractive format is highly popular among web readers.

Turning a blog into an infographic can be more challenging than creating a Slideshare, as there is far less room for text. Nonetheless, if you’ve produced an informative article that can be easily broken down into some more pertinent points- particularly if it involves statistics- an infographic could definitely be an option.

Example: The University of Delaware repurposed this blog about the growth of their Spring Break Service volunteering initiative into an infographic, making use of the most important statistics to ensure the visual was neat and uncluttered.

Presenting your content as Infographics can also lead to increased engagement on social media, with studies showing that infographics are three times more likely to be liked and shared than any other content, making them a vital part of your overall education lead generation strategy.

Although it is still important for schools to produce a steady supply of brand new content, repurposing material can be a valuable extra to throw into your marketing mix, increasing the frequency of your posts and helping you stay top of mind among prospective leads. Not only that, but producing content in different formats can increase the diversity of your content offers, helping you engage and appeal to a broader audience. And considering all the material already exists in the form of previous posts, it’s a win-win situation for schools looking to increase their content output.

What other ways does your school reuse content? What do you find is the most useful format to repurpose your existing posts? Join the conversation in the comments below!

With some estimating that video will account for as much as 74% of all internet traffic by 2017, it’s become increasingly crucial that schools incorporate it into their overall content strategy. Creative, informative, and interesting video has been shown to drive engagement more than anything on the web, with 52% of marketing professionals naming it as the content with the best ROI.

However, one area where video can present challenges is search engine optimisation. While SEO best practices for text-based content- such as incorporating linked keywords into the body text- is relatively common knowledge, optimising for video is less straightforward. Crawlers for search engines such as Google still have no way of reading and understanding video content, and rely instead on a system of metadata that can be difficult to understand.

If you’ve been struggling to boost the visibility of your school’s video clips in search rankings, read on for some useful tips to optimise your video content more effectively and drive more traffic to your site.

The most important ranking factors for video in search results are the title, description, and thumbnail. Titles for videos and their respective pages should be short and concise, but give a clear indication of the content, while the description can contain more details and relevant keywords where possible.

Example: The title and description of this clip from the University of Kent, which is a video diary submitted by a Malaysian international student, incorporates a number of strategic keywords, as well as a link to the university website, increasing its chances of ranking highly in results.

The video filename can also be important, so make sure it describes your content accurately, rather than using a generic or automatically generated name. The thumbnail you select for your video, while not a ranking factor in itself, does influence a user’s click-through rate and views, and selecting a striking or engaging image will help improve your education lead generation efforts.

On a more advanced level, many professionals now opt to create schema tags for their videos. Schema is a ‘shared markup vocabulary’ developed by schema.org and endorsed by top search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, with the aim of standardising some elements of SEO. Among them was the development of VideoObject tags, which are invisible on your page, but can be added to your html code, helping search engines to index your video content more accurately. Schools can attach schema tags that include everything from locations and people involved in their videos to descriptions of the content, and even full transcripts of the text.

Ideally, you should create a unique page for each video on your website. This gives you a unique URL to share on social media, and through onsite links and email marketing campaigns. It can also make it easier to create a video site map and allow Google to index the URL as a video page. A video site map is essentially a list of all of your video URLs. When submitted to search engines like Google, they will crawl each page confirming that video content is present and will then index them accordingly. Google offer a simple tutorial on how to make one for webmasters here.

Example: The University of Cambridge’s videos are all given their own unique URLs, making them more readable for search engines and allowing the school to maximise their potential SEO benefits.

Some experts also advise hosting your videos to your own domain, rather than on popular video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. The reason for this is that search engines are likely to crawl and index the version on the host site first, rather than your own webpage.

Example-This video ad from The University of Warwick’s website shows up in second in the SERPs for the extremely desirable search term ‘study in UK.’ Since the video is hosted to the university’s own domain rather than YouTube, the search result takes users directly to their website, improving its ranking while also making it more likely prospective students will view other content.

However, while a high ranking video like this can provide you with a much needed SEO boost, it’s worth noting that there is some risk in this strategy. YouTube is still prioritised by both users and search engines when seeking video online, and choosing to host your own clips could limit their potential reach. YouTube videos are also easier for users to share on other social media platforms. One compromise might be to create separate videos for both, allowing both your site and your YouTube channel to enjoy some SEO benefits from your content.

3. Optimising for YouTube is Essential to Generate More Student Inquiries From Video Content

Even if you do opt to host videos to your own domain, having some presence on YouTube is crucial for attracting new leads. The video sharing website is one of the most universally popular on the web, with over 1.3 billion users, which is just over a third of the total number of internet users worldwide.

YouTube is also by far the most advanced and efficient video search engine there is. While the company is owned by Google, it has its own search algorithm and indexing criteria which it uses to categorise and rank videos on its site.

While the video title, description and thumbnail are all still important on YouTube, schools also need to keep in mind a number of different ranking factors. One of the most effective ways to improve your SEO on YouTube is to add tags to your videos. These function in the same way as keywords, and can be a good way of improving your visibility in strategic searches.

In addition, even though most schools would probably prefer prospective students to view their content on their own website, having users engage with you on YouTube itself can be important to ensuring your visibility. Likes and dislikes, comments, bookmarks, and flags or reports all tell YouTube’s crawlers how well your content is being received and affect your ranking.

Example: This campus tour of Stanford University has been viewed almost 600,000 times on YouTube. That’s more than 16 times the student population of the school! That kind of reach is only possible on a universally popular platform like YouTube, further underlining why it’s such an essential platform for recruitment. As you can see, Stanford’s account has a large number of subscribers, while this video has attracted a high amount of likes, showing the importance of user engagement in helping clips spread on the site.

Although the total amount of views your videos receive will also have an effect on your visibility, view density is possibly a more important factor. YouTube’s algorithm prioritises videos that have received a large amount of views in a short space of time, as it can indicate that the post is topical and relevant. The amount of time users spend viewing a video is also taken into account, much like the bounce rate on ordinary webpages. Schools wishing to improve their performance in these areas can do so by focusing on newsworthy, informative content.

Promoting your videos through social media and your own website will also send strong authority signals to Google, as well as any backlinks and embeds you can gain by engaging your audience through other channels. In addition, your YouTube channel’s overall views and number of subscribers can also play a part in how well any new content you add ranks, as YouTube will take these indicators as a sign of authority.

One thing that can make SEO for schools on YouTube easier is that statistics on many videos are publicly available, allowing you to gain insight into the performance of top-rated videos. YouTube also offers a full suite of analytics tools to account holders, allowing you to measure and improve your performance over time.

Example: This video from Rice University in Texas documenting their 2016 move-in day has performed extremely well on YouTube since its release in August, with 5,758 views. They have made their video statistics graph publicly viewable, and it may offer some insight into the video’s success. For instance, you can see it gained its highest amount of views during its first day of release, suggesting it was probably promoted heavily by the school through their website and social media channels.

If you’re looking to maximise SEO value and generate as many potential leads as possible from your video content, you should really consider overlaying your video content with interactive links. YouTube offers a range of interactive options for video users known as YouTube Cards. A video can contain up to 5 cards, which can include text, images, and links. Cards can be used to link to your other video content and encourage prospective students to subscribe to your channel, and can also be linked back to your website.

Example: Bishop’s University in Canada use cards as CTAs in their recruitment videos to direct students to their website.

YouTube allows a maximum of five cards per video, which should generally be spaced out throughout your clip in order not to overload prospective students with links and detract from their viewing experience. Call to Action overlays can also be created for your videos using AdWords and YouTube TrueView, and you can also present them in your video ads as auto end screens, which automatically appear at the end of the clip.

Adding closed captions to your video content can be a wise move for schools, making it more viewable for people with hearing difficulties, or who simply don’t have access to audio when they come across your clips. But did you know that closed captioning can also help your SEO?

A 2013 study conducted by Discovery Digital Networks revealed that captioning was being indexed by Google’s crawlers, and also showed that captioned videos were viewed around 7.23% more than uncaptioned clips. Captioning your school’s video can be a useful way of elevating your ranking for strategic keywords.

Example: This promotional video from the University of Chicago uses closed captions. As you can see from the snippet below, it mentions information about areas like scholarships and financial aid. By closed captioning the video, the school ensures that it has a better chance of ranking for searches in those areas.

You might also consider making transcripts of your videos available. Transcripts allow you to present your video content in text form as well, providing an extra SEO boost for your content. While some websites present them on the same page as videos, they should ideally be placed on a separate link, as having too much text can divert attention from the video content and also lead to search engines classifying the URL as a text page rather than indexing it in video results. Creating additional pages for your transcript also has the added benefit of increasing the amount of links between the pages on your site, improving your off-page SEO.

Example: The University of Nebraska-Lincoln keeps transcripts for its videos on separate pages from the video content itself, making it more indexable for search engines.

Search engines are constantly striving to improve their indexing process for video, and working on new techniques to make video pages easier for crawlers to understand. As a result, it’s important that recruiters keep up to date with the latest developments in the area, and regularly assess the performance of their video content to see what can be improved. For now, however, all of these tactics can drastically improve video SEO strategy for schools, helping you engage and connect with students more effectively than ever before.

What techniques have you found to be most effective in optimising your video content? Join the conversation in the comments section below!

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/5-steps-optimizing-video-content-reach-prospective-students-online/feed0Stories, Moments, and Memories: 3 New Instagram, Twitter & Snapchat Features Recruiters Need to Know Abouthttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/stories-moments-memories-3-instagram-twitter-snapchat-features-recruiters
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/stories-moments-memories-3-instagram-twitter-snapchat-features-recruiters#commentsWed, 21 Sep 2016 13:52:13 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=18917]]>When a social media platform introduces a new feature, being among the early adopters can be crucial for marketing success. Incorporating the latest functionality into social content before your competition can help your posts stand out and gain more traction from the changes, attracting more followers and increasing your overall visibility on the site. This is especially true in student recruitment, where schools are more likely to have a younger, more digitally informed audience to keep up with.

The last few months have seen a number of interesting new features introduced to popular social media apps Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram, as the companies have sought to gain ground on one another in an increasingly competitive marketplace. These aren’t just small updates either, with each platform dramatically increasing their functionality, offering new possibilities for both brands and users, and widening their potential audiences.

Want to know what’s new in social media, and how it could help your student recruitment campaigns? Read on to find out.

1. Using Instagram Stories for Student Recruitment: The Best of Snapchat and Instagram in One?

For many, the social media story of the last few years has been the rise of Snapchat. The immediacy and authenticity of the app, with its short lived ‘self destructing’ posts, captured the imagination of millions of millennials who had grown tired of established social media sites.

With the platform now said to enjoy as many as 150 million daily users, other social media sites have begun to sit up and take notice, even going so far as to try and imitate some of the app’s functionality in order to regain lost ground.

Instagram Stories might be the most explicit attempt to win over Snapchat users by any social media site so far. The new feature, which was rolled out in August, is almost identical to Snapchat Stories, allowing users to post multiple picture and videos to a feed separate from their main Instagram profile grid, all of which disappear after 24 hours. Stories are displayed on a showreel that appears above each user’s newsfeed until they expire.

While it has been criticised for bearing so many similarities to the Snapchat version, Instagram Stories may well offer a number of advantages over its rival when it comes to social media marketing for schools. For a start, Instagram is still a far more popular platform, with double the amount of daily users. Instagram is also far more accommodating and welcoming to brands, with Snapchat still perceived as more of a personal platform for close friends. If the feature is successful, schools that have used Snapchat Stories successfully can transfer their tactics to Instagram and expect to potentially double their engagement.

Example: The University of Michigan have frequently used Snapchat to good effect, featuring fun, engaging montages like the one below, which featured highlights from a charity dance marathon which took place on campus. Instagram Stories will allow schools to showcase content like this to a much wider audience.

But Stories is far more than just Snapchat with improved reach. For a start, it’s the first Instagram feature to include rudimentary analytics, allowing you to see who is engaging with your stories and refine and target your initiatives.

In addition, while it’s currently not possible to like or comment on individual stories, prospective leads can send direct messages to your account when they view your posts, offering another possible avenue of engagement. Stories also allow users to overlay text on images, which some schools have already used to good effect to add marketing messages to their photos. Not only that, but unlike Snapchat’s version, users have the option of pausing and rewinding an individual Story, making it far more user-friendly.

Example: New York University have been among the first schools to make use of Instagram Stories, taking advantage of the new text overlay options to enhance scenic shots of their campus and city.

Stories also offers the potential for recruiters to be more playful with their Instagram feeds. While Instagram has always been associated with perfectly crafted, stylised presentation, the disappearing feed allows you to take more risks. Instagram allows users to post snippets of their story on their timeline to promote it, and schools could use this to test new tactics, seeing what attracts the most engagement from users before rolling it out on their main feeds. Instagram also has more flexible privacy settings than Snapchat, meaning schools can exclude certain followers from seeing their posts, allowing them to potentially target Stories to specific demographics in their audience.

Stories is still in its early days, and has some disadvantages next to Snapchat, such as a slightly less wide variety of filter options, but this may change as it continues to develop. Ultimately, however, Instagram’s success in getting users to embrace the feature will largely determine how useful it is for your recruitment campaigns.

2. Twitter Moments Could Help Your School Make Headlines

Twitter has also been looking to Snapchat for inspiration when it comes to incorporating new, more real-time aspects intro their platform. Twitter Moments, which was introduced late last year, features curated collections of content built around newsworthy topics, in a similar way to Snapchat’s Live Stories, which focuses on live events.

While Moments were previously compiled by Twitter’s in-house team, the site recently announced that it would be rolling out the feature for public use, first to a selection of brands and influencers, and then finally to all its users in the coming months.

The feature could provide recruiters with a fresh, unique way to promote their institution on Twitter. If schools are given free rein to create their own Moments, the focus on events could be ideal for everything from open days to application deadlines, as well as highlighting events unique to their school to help differentiate themselves from their competition.

What’s more, the amplified reach that Moments affords to featured posts could help recruiters capitalise on news which generates positive publicity for their school, such as university rankings.

Example: Twitter recently featured a Moment highlighting the release of the U.S. News & World Report and MONEY National University rankings. A number of tweets from official university accounts, students, and alumni were featured in the Moment, affording those schools some great exposure. Here you can see Tweets relating to Howard University and the University of Michigan’s inclusions.

So how can schools increase their chances of featuring in Moments like this? Refocusing your Tweets around more topical events will certainly help, but it’s also important to ensure that you post in a number of different formats. The best curators will assemble Moments featuring a wide variety of text, images, gifs, videos, and links to hold users’ interest, and providing something different and interesting will make them more likely to include your posts.

Although some experts see Moments as an attempt to win over the Snapchat audience, it could be said that the feature has more to do with consolidating Twitter’s status as the go-to social media platform for breaking news. And while Bloomberg recently reported that Snapchat has surpassed Twitter in daily users, most don’t really use it for news, with a recent NewsCred Quantitative Study revealing that 55% rarely or never view Live Stories. Twitter may well prove to be a far more natural fit for the format, offering recruiters much more potential to maximise their reach.

Make a Lasting Impression on Recruits with Snapchat Memories

Interestingly, as other platforms have moved to imitate Snapchat’s approach to social media, the company themselves have begun to pull in the opposite direction. August saw the launch of Snapchat Memories, a new feature that marks a significant departure from the app’s original, instantaneous functionality.

With Memories, Snapchat users can search for previous stories they’ve added to the app and reshare them to their followers, meaning posts will now have a much longer potential shelf life. They can also import photos from their phones’ camera roll, and even save new photos to Memories so they can return to them and edit them later before posting.

Although there are some concerns that Memories will diminish Snapchat’s unique selling point as an unfiltered, unpolished social communication tool, the feature could potentially make the app much more brand-friendly, particularly for student recruitment.

Given Snapchat’s younger user demographic, many schools have been very keen to maximise its potential to generate more student inquiries, but have found its short-term functionality made it difficult to get real ROI from the platform.

Memories offers recruiters the chance to present more carefully edited posts and, crucially, to reshare their best content at a later date, retargeting and remarketing to new prospects to dramatically increase each post’s potential reach.

Example: New York University’s HashtagNYU account on Snapchat frequently features some great, engaging material, such as these snaps taken from the campus’s Grey Art Gallery. With Memories, good posts like these can be reused in the future, rather than simply disappearing at the end of the day.

Another useful function of Memories is ‘Flashbacks’, a feature very similar to Facebook’s ‘Timehop’, which allows users to repost Snaps taken on the same date in previous years. Schools could use this function to draw attention to important dates or anniversaries, or reach out to current students or alumni on the platform to strengthen their connection with their existing community.

Example: Posts promoting campus events, particularly those featuring students, can be reshared using Memories to engage with those who attended. For instance, these pictures from Boston University’s recent Fall Arts Fair would be ideal for the format.

Like Instagram Stories, Memories attempts to move users away from the original functionality of the app, and it remains to be seen how well the current user base will take to the new features. However, if the feature is successful, it could make Snapchat even more important, winning over older users and cementing the platform as a comprehensive social media service and serious competitor in the wider marketplace.

Not only do Stories, Moments, and Memories offer social media users a far wider variety of ways to use each of these platforms, they also bring the overall functionality of each app much closer together. The new features will make Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat far more similar, increasing the already fierce competition between the three companies.

With that in mind, any of these sites could see significant upturns or downturns in the future, as social media users make their choice and begin to migrate towards the more popular platforms. Online student recruitment professionals would be wise to monitor their social media performance closely over the coming months, carefully measuring their analytics to track the effectiveness of any new campaigns, and ensuring they know which social sites are favoured by their targeted personas.

Have you used Stories, Moments, or Memories yet? Have you found any of these features useful in connecting with prospective students? Join the conversation in the comments section below.

]]>http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/stories-moments-memories-3-instagram-twitter-snapchat-features-recruiters/feed04 Simple Time Management Tips for Education Lead Generation Campaignshttp://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/4-simple-time-management-tips-education-lead-generation-campaigns
http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/blog/4-simple-time-management-tips-education-lead-generation-campaigns#commentsWed, 14 Sep 2016 13:02:47 +0000http://www.higher-education-marketing.com/?p=18895]]>Online student recruitment is a field full of talented, dedicated professionals with extensive knowledge of the field and dozens of creative ideas to improve lead generation for their institution. The vast majority are well versed in the latest trends, best practices, and methods to build a successful inbound marketing strategy. So why is it that some schools excel in online recruitment where others seem to fall behind?

For many schools, the biggest obstacle to achieving their online recruitment goals is simply time. A recent survey conducted by QS Digital Solutions among recruitment professionals reported as many as 17.6% of schools viewed time restraints as their main challenge in 2016.

This statistic is possibly not that surprising. Each element of a successful inbound marketing strategy requires a certain amount of available working hours that some institutions simply don’t have, especially smaller schools with limited staff. And when recruiters spread themselves too thin, deadlines get missed, mistakes are made, and campaigns fail to reach their full potential.

So how can schools facing time limitations still get positive results from their online recruitment initiatives? Read on for a number of simple but effective ways to save time on your campaigns.

Many online student recruitment initiatives are incredibly time-sensitive. In order to generate the maximum amount of leads and get the most from their campaigns, schools have to plan to ensure their online visibility is at its highest during crucial times of year when prospective students are more likely to be researching their destinations or deciding on offers from different institutions.

Recruitment fairs, open days, and other initiatives also require schools to time their campaigns impeccably in order to ensure their success. This can put a lot of pressure on recruiters, particularly those with limited resources, as failing to have their campaigns ready to go on time can seriously limit their chances of keeping up with the completion.

Example: In the UK, universities use the UCAS application system to make offers to students. When all the offers have gone out, schools allow students to apply for any available places left on their courses between July and September, which is known as ‘Clearing’. It’s highly competitive, and most universities run concentrated Clearing campaigns.

The video guide to the system from The University of Hertfordshire below is incredibly effective, but was also probably time consuming to put together, so planning was very important to delivering the finished product on time.

So how can recruiters ensure that their campaigns run on schedule? One simple yet effective way is to create a reverse to-do list for your initiative, starting from your ideal deadline and working backwards. In the example above, for instance, the university would have set a deadline for the video to be finished before clearing in July. From there, they might work backwards, estimating when the final editing needed to be done, then shooting, casting, writing the script etc. Working this way can help give you a much clearer view of how much time you actually have, and stop you from getting sidetracked or taking too long completing a particular task.

2. Synergise Your School’s Social Media Posting Schedule

Many recruitment professionals find that managing their social media profiles is surprisingly time consuming. Because social media posts tend to be short in nature, it can appear deceptively simple, but between managing your presence on a number of different platforms, keeping up with trends and changes, and responding and engaging with your followers, your social media workload can pile up quickly.

One way to keep on top of things is to use scheduling and management tools to organise your accounts. Many schools will already use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule and monitor their social media updates across a number of different platforms in one place, and this can be tremendously helpful.

Recruiters can also make use of automation tools to synchronise certain common tasks, such as posts that need to be duplicated across more than one social platform. For instance, IFTTT, a synchronisation service which connects a number of different apps and allows users to create ‘recipes’ which cause their actions on one platform to automatically trigger an action on another, can be an incredibly useful tool for this.

Example: Many schools add content from their other social media platforms to their Pinterest boards. You can see a few examples below of some common IFTTT recipes for Pinterest which automatically import and share content to the platform from other sites such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Automation tools should be used cautiously and only when necessary, as it’s important to maintain some diversity across each of your social media platforms rather than sharing identical posts on every site. Tools which allow for automated responses to comments from followers are also best avoided, as they can make interactions feel impersonal. Nonetheless, when seeking to perform some small functions, automation can be extremely helpful in taking some of the busywork out of social media management and freeing up your time.

Example: The University of Michigan has a Pinboard for its Instagram photos. Tools like IFTTT can enable schools to automate processes like this, automatically sharing their content from one site to another.

3. Automate Your PPC Recruitment Campaign Tasks with AdWords Scripts

Like social media, PPC campaigns can quickly become time consuming for recruiters. Keeping track of campaigns, adjusting bids, and implementing new keywords can all accumulate. Fortunately, there are some options available that can help ease your workload.

One of the most useful is AdWords Scripts, a tool which allows users to automate certain functions in their campaigns using Javascript codes. While it can seem complicated at first, Google offers an easy-to-follow tutorial so that even novices can start creating their own scripts, while any schools with developers on staff can create custom scripts to fulfil a range of functions. Among other things, this tool can allow recruiters to:

Automatically adjust bids on keywords

Add new keywords to campaigns

Pause campaigns

Create customised reports

Detect broken links

All of these tasks can be set up to run systematically and at regular intervals, taking a lot of the pain out of the day-to-day management of PPC marketing for higher education. The scripts can also interact with external data sources or create alerts to notify you when significant targets or met. As with social media automation, they should be used with caution and reviewed manually on a regular basis, but provided proper care is taken, AdWords Scripts can be a huge timesaver.

Example: Google offers a number of ready-to-go, automated AdWords scripts that can save you a lot of time and heartache in your PPC campaigns. The below example is a new ‘negative keyword’ script, which alerts of you of any potential problems your negative keywords might create in helping your ads show up in relevant search queries.

4. Increase Your School’s Content Output with User Generated Posts

While every stage of the inbound marketing process can be time consuming, content creation is possibly the most labour intensive. For schools that are looking to build their presence on the web by producing well-researched quality posts, it can be difficult to keep posting regularly, particularly if you don’t have dedicated content strategy and development staff.

One possible way to increase your flow of content is to include more user-generated posts on your site. Many schools allow current students to post regular blogs, or invite guest blogs on occasion from faculty members, alumni, or other people associated with their institution. You can even use it as a means to produce content focused on a key part of your audience. For instance, some schools have had great success by allowing international students to keep diaries or video logs.

Example: York University in the United Kingdom posts a number of student diaries, covering everything from regular first year undergraduates to students doing a year abroad as part of master’s program. This particular entry comes from Chinese chemistry student Lisa Ying Jao, who offers prospective recruits in a highly desirable market a relatable and engaging view of life at the school.

It’s not just written content that can be sourced from you school’s wider community. Your student body can also be useful in providing photo content for image-based platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. By encouraging them to share their snapshots of campus life on social media, perhaps using a specific hashtag, you can create a regular stream of great photo content to keep your followers engaged.

Example: The University of Berkeley invite students to share content on their official Instagram page using their #BerkeleyPOV hashtag. Student photos provide them with a wide array of different and interesting images.

While your school should still create its own content on a regular basis, user generated posts can be a great way to make sure there is always new material on your website and social media platforms to keep users engaged and drive traffic. It can also provide you with a number of fresh and diverse voices to reach prospective recruits more effectively.

Of course, none of these techniques offer a cure-all solution for your time management issues. Improving the efficiency of your inbound marketing initiatives can take some time to get right in itself, and a lot of trial and error before you find the right balance for your school. Nonetheless, with a bit of creative thinking, you can always find ways to increase your productivity and get more done with your day.

What’s the biggest problem your school has with time management? What timesaving solutions have helped your campaigns in the past? Leave a comment below and tell us about your experiences!

While there are many excellent design examples out there, the sad truth is that the websites of universities and other educational institutions don’t generally have a great reputation. The combination of having to cater to a number of different audiences as well as the need to include information about a huge amount of programs, faculties, and services makes it difficult to create simple, intuitive sites that will be easy for users to navigate.

The result, all too often, is frustration for everyone from prospective students to alumni, and it’s no surprise that a recent survey by QS Digital Solutions of over 170 education marketing professionals revealed that website design and optimisation was the most frequently cited priority for recruiters, with 32.9% stating that it was the area they would be focusing on most in 2016.

So how can university design teams produce an easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing, and responsive web design, while still including all the information that their audiences are likely to want? Read on for some useful tips that will help make your website a better place to visit.

Does this comic reflect your website? One of the biggest problems users claim to have with university sites is that some of the most useful information is ‘buried.’ This often includes basic things you would expect to find quite easily, such as campus maps, timetables, and information on fees and financing.

Even more worryingly from an online lead generation perspective, details of programs and courses on offer are often organised confusingly. In a survey conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, 48% of prospective students didn’t realise that a specific university offered a particular program, even though it was available. Offering an indexed list of all your programs and courses- and making it easy to find- is a crucial first step to making your website less confusing for prospective students.

Example: Virginia Commonwealth University’s includes fully indexed A-Z lists of both the programs and courses they offer. Crucially, both lists are accessible in just one click from the drop down menu on their homepage.

Other examples of essential information that is not always easy to find on school websites includes contact information for the institution, links to leading faculties and departments, and staff directories. So how can developers refine their designs so that all the most essential information is readily available, while still keeping the site simple and intuitive for users?

The key is good navigation. A site which follows a logical structure and organises its content using a well-defined information hierarchy will be easy for visitors to follow, while eliminating the need for long, cluttered menus and allowing designers to make the layout more aesthetically pleasing for users. Conducting a content inventory of all the information required on your website will help you to organise and categorise your pages more efficiently, identifying the principle areas your target audience need to know about and allowing you to create the simplest navigation bar possible while still covering all the bases.

A content inventory typically involves collecting all the existing webpage URLs, media files and other content on your site and organising it using a spreadsheet. This can be time-consuming, although a number of web crawling tools offered by companies like Screaming Frog can make the process easier. From there, you can summarise each page and its purpose and identify missing information.

Once you’re sure you have everything you need, you can use diagrams to create a natural hierarchical structure for your information, categorising your pages into different sections and prioritising the content that will matter most to visitors to your site.

Example: The University of Chicago’s website has attracted widespread acclaim for its design. It’s simple and clutter-free, yet the logical information hierarchy the drop down menus follow makes it extremely easy to find what you need. As an added bonus, the minimalist structure also gives the site plenty of room to place eye-catching, topical university news at the center of the page using a scrolling slideshow.

One problem you may encounter when trying to create a clear information hierarchy is differing opinions among various stakeholders over what should be prioritised. The ‘design by committee’ approach many schools take is a commonly cited problem in website development, but often necessary given the range of different faculties and departments that need to have input into the process.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a hindrance to you achieving your goals, and fostering open communication between your team could help improve the overall site structure. Brainstorming, card sorting and whiteboard sessions are all good options that will get them to work closely together to find solutions that suit all parties and create a better, more intuitive web experience will benefit everyone involved with your school.

2. Apply Proven Design Principles to Your School’s Site

Another way to ensure your website is intuitive for users is to follow tried and tested design rules. It’s well established that the use of contrast, bold type, and a well-balanced colour palette with an even distribution of white space all make web pages easier for users to read. These principles can be particularly important in facilitating the high content density some schools requires on their pages, as a well thought out visual format will make it easier for visitors to take in all the information.

Example: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s emphasis on architecture, engineering, and fine arts programs necessitates a slightly more content-heavy site than normal, but the design uses contrast and plenty of white space to make it more readable for users.

Studies have also shown that today’s internet users scan pages rather than read them, and that few users scroll down ‘below the fold’ on a page. As a result, arranging your content items in easily scannable snippets at the top of your page will dramatically increase your chances of further engagement.

Example: The Rhode Island School of Design’s news page features easily readable snippets, with links to website articles, media stories about the school, and their blog all arranged near the top of the page. You’ll notice that the content follows an ‘f-shaped’ pattern, which is based on the idea that users will naturally scan the page from left to right, and is one of the most commonly used design techniques.

Because many of your prospective students will be scanning your pages, it’s also important to ensure that information that will appeal to them, such as university rankings, graduate career statistics, or any other key selling points of your institution, aren’t buried in the middle of long articles. Many universities incorporate these key messages into their page design as standalone graphics or links, using vibrant colours and large fonts to ensure they stand out, and this can be a useful way to ensure visitors to your site see them.

Example: Bates College places short snippets of key information for future students, parents, and alumni prominently on its homepage, with CTAs which link to articles for users to learn more.

Schools wishing to evaluate whether their layout corresponds to design best practices like these might want to consider testing it using heat map analysis. As we wrote in a recent blog, this process can reveal a number of design inconsistencies by mapping the browsing behaviour of users using eyetracking or moustracking software, allowing you to identify any problem areas on your site.

Since many larger institutions are divided into different colleges, faculties, and departments, each with an average website’s worth of content to manage by itself, it’s natural that the stylistic elements of certain sections of your website might end up differing. After all, each department has a wildly different audience to consider, and sticking to a totally rigid design structure might lessen the chances of appealing to certain demographics.

Unfortunately, many universities have too much differentiation among their subdomains, with certain faculty sites bearing no resemblance to the main site design, or even failing to make the university they belong to clear and potentially confusing students.

Establishing common design guidelines will help ensure consistency across all your school’s subdomains, different portals, and alternate language sites, making the site more familiar for users and encouraging smoother navigation. A design language should include things like fonts, logos, page templates, and image and writing style guidelines. While there may be some room for customisation among different schools and subdomains, your school should settle on a number of elements to include on every page, such as your logo and a common colour scheme.

Example: The University of Notre Dame has a number of subdomains for each of its colleges and schools, which are often customised to suit their specific audiences. Here, you can see the clear design difference between their business school and their film and television department pages.

However, each subsite maintains some sense of design consistency, using the school colours and featuring the university logo prominently at the top of the page, which also serves as a link to the main homepage, making it easier for students to browse different subject areas.

Your design language should also apply to any microsites or landing pages you develop for short-term campaigns, or external projects such as community outreach programs or research initiatives. Consistency is an important part ofbranding for schools, helping togive a sense of uniformity and order to all your online content and make it more instantly recognisable among your audience.

4. Don’t Cater to Prospective Recruits at the Expense Of Other Audiences

Even where there have been improvements in web design among many institutions in recent years, it’s worth noting that it has sometimes come at the expense of user experience among certain demographics. School websites have many different potential audiences: prospective students, current undergraduates, postgraduates, alumni, parents, staff, corporate and community partners, and even the press.

Understandably, it’s hard to please everyone, and one complaint cited by many visitors is that the sites don’t seem to be designed to cater for them. Chief among the concerns is that many sites seem set up solely for the purpose of recruitment, with very little information of use for other demographics.

While student recruitment is understandably among the top priorities for schools when it comes to branding and web development, it shouldn’t be the only priority. Not only does focusing too much on prospective students build ill will among other parts of your student community, but it goes against some of the key tenets of inbound marketing best practices. Today’s intelligent, media literate audience tend to respond negatively to direct selling, and a website which is pitched solely towards driving them to make an application will not resonate well.

In addition, prospective students visiting your website are looking to get a feel for what life as a student at your school will be like, and seeing content designed with current students in mind will be seen as an encouraging sign that the university cares about its current student body as well as new recruits. With that in mind,finding some balance in your information hierarchy and ensuring your site has a more broad appeal could actually be helpful to your recruitment efforts.

But how can you do this while still maintaining a simple design? Many college websites include navigation bars that categorise information into different audiences such as current students, prospective students, postgraduates etc., and this can be a useful way of helping visitors find the information they need.

To ensure you cover all of your bases, it might be worth creating and defining personas for your current students, faculties, and other groups, just as you would with potential students. This will allow you to define their motivations more clearly and ensure your site works to engage as many people as possible.

Example: Brown University’s website is a good example of a design which clearly offers information for a number of different audiences while remaining clutter-free and easy to navigate. You can see a secondary navigation bar for each of their different personas, including everyone from ‘current students’ to ‘friends and neighbors.’ You might also notice that the content highlighted on its home page, which relates to interesting research projects, has potentially broad appeal among a range of different audiences.

Creating the best possible website for your school takes time, and can involve a lot of trial and error. Conducting usability tests with sample members of your target audiences when you make changes can be worthwhile, and help you evaluate whether any new elements you have implemented have had the desired effect. Monitoring the browsing habits of visitors through cookies and setting clear goals through Google Analytics are also useful ways to measure the success of your development initiatives, allowing you to refine and customise your site over time to better reflect the needs of your audience.

What do you feel could be improved about your school’s website? What changes have you made in the past that have improved your site’s usability? Join the conversation in the comments section below, and tell us about your experiences!

Love it or hate it, there’s been no escaping the Pokemon Go craze over the last few months. The augmented reality app based on the popular anime franchise has taken the world by storm since its release in June, with 100 million downloads on Google Play alone by early August, the same amount of daily users as Twitter, and a higher average daily usage time than Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, and Messenger.

While only time will tell if the app can maintain its momentum, its popularity among younger age groups has forced recruiters to sit up and take notice of the trend, with some even finding ways of incorporating the phenomenon into their promotional activities.

Even more intriguingly, its success has taken augmented reality technology mainstream, opening up a number of exciting possibilities for schools to discover new, fun, and innovative ways to engage with the online community.

In this blog, we not only explore the marketing potential of Pokemon Go, but also augmented reality as a whole, demonstrating the enormous potential of the technology to enhance your student recruitment campaigns in ways you never thought possible.

How Does Augmented Reality Work? A Guide for Recruiters

Augmented reality (AR) technology allows you to view superimposed digital content in a real-life environment through a digital device. AR applications work by creating markers for specific locations and objects, when can then be overlaid with sound, images, visuals and 3D graphics, and unlocked by anyone using that specific AR application.

Whereas virtual reality creates a completely artificial environment, AR places content within the real world in real time. This offers a number of potential advantages for marketers, allowing them to connect with people anywhere as they go about their daily lives, increasing their ability to attract and engage with their targeted audience.

Read on for five innovative ways schools around the world are already using augmented reality to connect with potential recruits.

1. How Schools Are Using Pokemon GO To Catch Prospective Students Online

Pokemon GO uses mobile GPS to allow users to locate and capture virtual creatures, which appear on their screens in real world locations through the use of AR technology. This aspect of the game makes it unique from most popular phone apps, as it encourages users to get outside and explore their surroundings, offering further incentives by placing special ‘gyms’ and ‘pokestops’- locations where users can battle or load up on in-game rewards- at various landmarks.

Even in its brief lifetime, the app has already attracted a number of forward-thinking schools eager to use it to connect with both current and prospective students, most noticeably on social media. The augmented reality setting makes it perfect for promoting your campus, as recruiters can easily take screenshots of Pokemon in the game next to well-known landmarks, sharing them on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter and encouraging students to do the same.

Example: Harvard University are among the many schools who have shared images from the game outside well-known campus landmarks, like this one near Memorial Hall.

Other universities have been even more proactive in finding clever ways to use the game to gain exposure, with many actively promoting the gyms and pokestops on their campus via social media sites and their own websites.

Example: Duke University even shared a special map of their campus for Pokemon GO users:

You’ll notice that the university is also promoting its own specific hashtag for the game to encourage social sharing. Not only that, but Duke even went as far as placing lures- in-game purchases that draw Pokemon to a specific location- outside their admissions office for any visiting prospects, and even incorporated it into their email lead nurturing campaigns, sending out a mail blast encouraging potential recruits to visit the pokestops on their campus, including their lemur sanctuary, which also featured heavily in their social media activities.

With the app still in its infancy, recruiters have only begun exploring its potential to generate more student enquiries, and may find even more useful ways to use it in future. One area in which many experts are predicting it could take off in a big way is themed campus tours, which allow prospective students to be shown around facilities while they enjoy the game.

Example: Washington State University Tri-Cities is already offering student-led tours of its grounds:

Pokemon GO developers Niantic have also started implementing sponsored locations into the game, beginning in Japan, where all McDonald’s restaurants are now a pokestop or a gym. The sponsored locations will be available on a ‘cost per visit’ basis- similar to PPC ads- and could provide another interesting avenue for recruiters.

2. Using Augmented Reality to Transform Your Campus Tours

While offering Pokemon GO themed campus tours is a fun and interesting idea, it’s just one of the possibilities augmented reality offers to enhance the way you show prospective students around your campus.

In fact, a number of forward-thinking universities had already begun offering augmented reality elements in their campus tour experience long before Pokemon GO took off. Using AR technology, recruiters can place augmented reality triggers around their campus, overlaying various multimedia elements that offer visitors information about different faculties and programs, support services, and unique insights into the history of the campus.

Example: This AR tour was recently designed by students at the University of Florida. Available as an app known as UDiscover, the tour incorporates historic video footage, images, sound, and text to offer users a unique perspective of the campus.

Schools looking to develop their own tours will also find a number of AR platforms available from third party developers, such as Layar, a versatile program that offers a range of different features. AR platforms tend to be very customisable, and schools that have made use of the technology have found a number of creative ways to put their own stamp on it, and convey elements of their unique identity and history to prospective students.

Example: Cal Poly Pomona’s Layar tour features a number of fun, quirky insights into the history of the campus, showing visitors the former site of the school’s ice cream shop at the Bronco student center, and even telling the story of a 1969 fraternity initiation prank in which students attempted to steal a pig when users visit the school’s swine unit!

Even as prospective students do more and more research online when choosing schools, the campus tour remains hugely influential in their decision making process. After all, it’s their first chance to see your school in the flesh, and for many, the point at which they begin visualising themselves as a student there. Giving them a truly memorable experience like this could dramatically increase your chances of becoming their first choice institution.

3. Bringing Your School to Life with Immersive Experiences

As AR technology continues to develop, the capabilities it offers become even more exciting. Recruiters may soon have the option to go beyond simple campus tours and employ the technology to create larger events and immersive experiences that utilise complex customised functions, incorporating elements like gamificaiton and role playing.

Example: One of the most ambitious uses of AR technology by universities so far has come from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used an open source AR development platform known as ARIS to create a situated documentary for prospective students visiting the campus known as ‘Dow Day’. The user was given the role of a news reporter asked to cover a historic protest that took place at the university in 1967 against the Dow Chemical Company.

After downloading the app, prospective students are directed to various locations on campus that were significant to the protest and interact with various characters, asking them questions to learn more about the event.

You can see a demonstration of how ‘Dow Day’ works here:

With this kind of technology, your school could create any number of immersive experiences for prospective recruits, perhaps bringing significant moments from your own campus’s unique history to life, building AR activities around current events, or anything else you might feel will help you engage and connect with potential leads more effectively. As AR continues to advance, the possibilities are seemingly endless.

4. Add Another Level of Engagement with Recruits to Your Print Advertising Campaigns

One intriguing facet of augmented reality is that it offers the potential to bring together your online student recruitment initiatives with your more traditional print campaigns in a way that has never really been possible before. Because AR uses real world objects or locations as triggers to display content on digital devices, everything from billboards to newspaper ads suddenly have potential for more engagement.

Example: Simpson College married AR technology to prints ads very effectively in 2013 with a banner they placed in a popular mall in Des Moines, Iowa. By downloading an app and following the instructions, shoppers were able to view a special thirty second promotional video which brings the banner to life with various impressive graphics.

You can see the campaign in action, as well as the public reaction here:

Incredibly, the cost of an ad like this isn’t much more than a traditional print advertisement. The school used a free version of Hewlett Packard’s Aurasma platform, which allows users to create their own AR content to be viewed through the app. As Simpson College’s Digital Content Specialist Greg Votava explained to collegewebeditor, “Really the only cost of this project, other than my time, was the cost of the banner hanging at the mall and a secondary sign that explains how to download the app and make our banner come to life.”

Not only is the technology relatively cost-effective, but it also offers far more direct opportunities for engagement that traditional print advertising. Because the AR content is digital, marketers are able to add elements such as linked keywords and targeted calls-to-action, increasing their chances of converting potential leads.

AR also offers greater potential for measurability than has ever been possible from ordinary print campaigns, allowing recruiters to track views and conversions. The Simpson College banner, for example, included a CTA, which the institution could add a campaign tag to in order to track its success. Aurasma has since introduced its own comprehensive analytics dashboard for paid customers, which tracks views, interactions, and conversions.

5. Bring AR Technology to Prospective Students Around The World in Your Print Promotional Materials

Advertisements aren’t the only area of your print campaigns where you can incorporate AR. Institutions around the world are already using the technology in a wide range of printed promotional materials, including admissions viewbooks, prospectuses, and brochures. Developing AR for these kinds of documents means you can bring the technology to prospective recruits by mail, at recruitment fairs, or just simply make it available instantly to anyone who walks into your admissions office.

Example: The University of Waterloo are among a number of universities who have developed AR functionality for their promotional materials. Their admissions viewbook uses Layar, the same platform Cal Poly Pomona employ for their campus tours, to allow prospective students to view additional photos, text, and even video testimonials from current undergraduates, adding an extra personalised touch to the experience.

The back cover also features a number of CTAs which allow users to go straight to the university website after they have finished reading, which enables the admissions department to track conversions.

Check out the viewbook here:

As you can see, augmented reality has already been used by a number of schools to bring new dimensions to their education lead generation initiatives. As the success of Pokemon GO brings the possibilities of the technology to the attention of the wider public, incorporating AR features into recruitment campaigns is only going to become more common.

As a result, schools wishing to develop their own AR offerings will want to ensure they stand out from the crowd by creating original, quality content and experiences that communicate their unique institutional identity, keeping track of the latest advances in AR functionality, and applying some inbound marketing best practices to any AR ventures in order to maximise the potential for increased engagement and conversion.

Fortunately, there are a number of affordable, easy-to-use options available for schools looking to get involved, and the trailblazing campaigns of some of the institutions mentioned in this blog should give you plenty of ideas to get started. Have fun!

Have you used augmented reality tech in your recruitment campaigns? Has your school hopped on the Pokemon GO bandwagon? Join the conversation in the comment section below and tell us about your experiences!

How often do your review your SEO strategy? While certain SEO best practices-such as well indexed, quality content, and strategically integrated keywords- will always help ensure good visibility on the web, search engine optimisation at a more advanced level is far more nuanced, with marketing professionals having to constantly tweak and refine their approaches to keep up with the updates and algorithm tweaks that Google and other providers implement on a regular basis.

The past year has seen a number of different changes to way that search engines read, understand, and rank content, with technological advances including artificial intelligence, new mobile platforms, and the rise of voice search all contributing to provide a more intuitive experience for web users. For those in student recruitment, keeping track of the latest SEO developments is especially important, given that many prospective students fall into younger, more tech-literate demographics.

So what should your school be considering in order to make their SEO more efficient? Read on to find out.

1. What is RankBrain and How Does it Affect SEO for Schools?

An artificial intelligence system which was incorporated into Google’s search algorithm Hummingbird last year, RankBrain is now the company’s third most important ranking factor, according to Google Senior Research Scientist Greg Corrado, with only links and content having more bearing on where your site shows up in search results pages.

So why is RankBrain so important to Google? The system uses machine-learning technology to understand not just the words in a search query, but their relationship with each other, allowing it to gain a clearer idea of user intent. In the past, Google had issues with queries that used overly verbose, ambiguous or colloquial language, and also had problems with unique queries that had never been searched before, which the company estimates makes up around 15% of its daily searches.

You’ve probably already seen RankBrain in action in your daily lives if you’ve been looking for an answer to an ambiguous query, such as trying to find the name of a celebrity based on a description of them, or searching for a particular word that had escaped you by typing in its meaning. RankBrain analyses these kinds of queries in order to provide you with more useful answers.

Example: You can see some elements of RankBrain working here to answer an ambiguous query. The search “Which university was Facebook invented in?” would previously have been quite hard for Google to understand, given its casual wording and the potential to confuse the meaning of certain terms in the sentence. Using RankBrain, Google can immediately connect the query with pages detailing the history of Facebook, and scan the articles to highlight Harvard as the correct answer.

While RankBrain has created considerable waves among SEO experts because of its importance to ranking, optimising your school’s online student recruitment initiatives for the system shouldn’t require a massive overhaul of your strategy.

Since RankBrain is looking for the best, most specific answers to questions, it tends to favour niche sites with well-researched and focused content, which actually makes it ideal for schools, and could make it easier to connect with leads, rather than harder. Nonetheless, it is likely that certain search terms your school might previously have experienced success with will take a small hit, particularly certain long tail keywords.

Recruiters should also be prepared for click-through rates (CTRs) to become a much bigger factor in their organic searches. RankBrain rates pages for relevance using similar technology to Google AdWords Quality Score system. Consequently, it rewards pages with higher than average CTRs, recognising it as a signal that the content is more relevant to the intent behind the search.

While RankBrain won’t change many SEO best practices, it’s probably worthwhile conducting a systematic review of your current keyword strategy with the technology in mind. One of the most efficient ways of doing this is through semantic keyword research, which involves dividing your keywords into three specific groups:

1. Core Keywords- These are the most basic keywords which describe your school’s content and services in the clearest way. You can find semantic keywords by looking for variations on phrases that aren’t much different from the targeted phrases and their meanings.

Example: ‘Study engineering in Australia’ would be a good example of a core keyword for universities offering engineering programs in the country. As you can see from the search results page, Deakin University has targeted the phrase for a PPC campaign, recognising its strategic importance.

2. Thematic Keywords- These are less specific phrases that have some thematic relationship to your services, addressing the underlying motivations behind the search. Returning to our core keyword example, a good related thematic keyword might be ‘study engineering abroad’ in order to address international students.

3. Stem Keywords- These are more specific long tail keywords, and possibly the most important in relation to RankBrain. Stem keywords are more specific queries and require a nuanced understanding of how internet users ask questions. Assembling a list of stem keywords will allow you to deliver more targeted content, such as blog posts, which speak to specific queries and zone in on your targeted personas more effectively.

Example: This post from studiesinaustralia.com, a guidance website for international students, details the advantages of studying engineering in the country. It’s informative and answers a very specific user query, and probably commands a fairly high CTR. As a result, it’s one of the top results for stem searches such as ‘how to choose an engineering program in Australia,’ ranking fourth in the overall search list. Focused content like this is only going to become more important as a result of RankBrain.

This approach can help you ensure your keyword strategy is as finely tuned as possible, limiting any potential negative effect RankBrain might have and allowing you to refocus both your SEO and content development.

2. The Importance of Optimising for Voice Search to Reach Today’s Prospective Recurits

Another factor which may have a dramatic impact on the future of SEO is the rise of voice search applications. Recent figures from Global Web Index indicate that one in every five users aged between 16-64 regularly use voice search on their mobiles, with even higher percentages of 16-24 year-olds:

Not only that, but voice search is moving away from being a mobile-only feature, with Google, Microsoft, and Apple all pushing systems for use on desktop devices. In addition, voice search can be incredibly important in large international recruitment markets, such as China, where mobile users tend to favour voice search tools because many mobile keyboards aren’t particularly well suited to typing in their language.

This has the potential to be a huge game-changer for SEO in all fields. Shifting away from typed queries to speech fundamentally alters the language users employ while searching like nothing before it. At a very basic level, recruiters may need to look to adopt a more conversational tone. In addition, since voice search platforms function based on questions or commands, pages which answer specific queries will stand a much better chance of achieving top results, just like with RankBrain.

Example: This blog post from the MIT School of Engineering ranks high for the question-based search term “How do I choose an engineering major?” as a result of its conversational title. This sort of query-based content is needed to rank highly in post-voice search SEO.

Blogs posts like these shouldn’t be the only place you focus on optimising for voice search, however. Your program pages and student support information may all need to be focused on providing more direct answers to queries. Another part of your website which could become increasingly important is your ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages. Voice search apps are likely to identify FAQs as a good source of answers to searches involving your school, so ensuring these are as detailed as possible will become more crucial.

Example: The University of Nottingham’s FAQs section is not only detailed, but extremely well laid out. It covers more common general queries, but also has dedicated subsections for undergraduates, postgraduates, and students at specific campuses. When properly optimised using SEO best practices, this layout makes it much easier for web crawlers to read and understand.

However, optimising for voice search isn’t as simple as adopting a more conversational tone. One important tip for recruiters looking to generate more student enquiries from voiced-based services is to consider which voice search apps your students are likely to be using. At present, there are three main voice search systems on the market, each with their own different SEO needs:

Siri- Possibly the most famous voice search app, Apple’s personal assistant system is available on all iPhones and iPads, and is being rolled out on the company’s latest Mac operating system later this year. Designed to be as intuitive as possible, Siri is perhaps the best voice search app at understanding natural language, making it ideal for conversational long tail keywords. One important thing to note when optimising for Siri is that, since 2013, the app has used Microsoft’s Bing as its default search engine, making it increasingly important to devote more attention to SEO for Google’s chief competitor.

Cortana- Microsoft also has its own voice search app, which uses Bing as its default search engine too. While currently less sophisticated than Apple and Google’s offerings, Cortana does have potential to grow, chiefly because in addition to being available on all Windows phones, Android, and iOS, the app is also a default feature on Windows 10, making it ideally placed to gain more of a market share as voice search moves to desktop.

Google Now- Google’s system may be the most strategically important in the current market, chiefly because, as the main voice search app for all Android systems, it’s currently on 83.7% of phones worldwide. Google Now is also available in the company’s Chrome internet browser, giving it a foothold in the desktop market. For recruiters, the app also offers a number of strategic advantages. Google Now uses the vast reservoir of specific data its parent company’s other applications collect about user preferences and demographic information to refine its searches, meaning it’s more likely to rank your school’s results highly with existing leads, making it a potentially valuable remarketing tool.

In addition to these points, you also need to focus on inbound SEO to maximise your visibility in voice searches. Social media platforms, in particular, such as Facebook and Twitter, are often more likely to be used to answer user queries on voice search than direct websites, so getting your content shared regularly on these platforms will be vital to ensuring your school doesn’t fall behind.

Most professionals who are actively involved in SEO for schools will be familiar with the much talked about ‘Mobilegeddon’ update to Google’s algorithm last year, which incorporated the mobile-friendliness of a site as a ranking factor for the first time. The change sparked some panic in the online community, with one survey showing that 40% of sites would be affected. So naturally, similar concerns arose when Google announced it would be boosting its mobile-friendly algorithm in May of this year.

The 2016 update is less drastic, and the company has stated it will have no effect on sites which are already mobile-ready. Nonetheless, the change does increase the importance of being mobile-friendly in the rankings even further, make it even more imperative to ensure that your mobile pages are on point.

While most institutions have created some form of mobile version of their site at this point, it’s still possible for small problems such as faulty redirects or internal links to your desktops pages to be missed in the process and bring your ranking down. Simple content errors, such as using small font sizes or including video content which uses platforms that are unsupported on mobile – such as Flash- also detract from your mobile-friendliness and can indirectly affect your SEO.

It may also be worthwhile to work proactively in preparing your school’s website for anticipated changes in Google’s algorithm. One update which is expected sooner rather than later involves the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, which is an open source initiative introduced by Google and a number of large publishers in order to create mobile versions of web pages with almost instant loading times, similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles.

AMP links are already displayed prominently on mobile searches, and while it is currently not a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, the web giant has indicated that it will become one at some point in the near future. With that in mind, creating AMP pages for your site would be a wise move, helping you stay ahead of the curve while also improving user experience for prospective students checking out your school on mobile devices. Best of all, it’s relatively easy to implement, with most top publishing platforms offering simple plug-ins for AMP creation.

Example: WordPress offer an AMP plug-in that will automatically generate AMP versions of every post you create.

Depending on the nature of your recruitment activities and current SEO practices, some of these developments will affect your school more than others, and it’s always important to continue tracking your online performance using analytics in order to quickly identify problems and keep your inbound marketing initiatives running smoothly.

And while keeping up with the constant refinement of search engine services requires a lot of effort, all of these changes are done with end user experience in mind. As a result, evolving in line with changes in SEO best practices will not only help your school maintain online visibility, but will also contribute to a better, more intuitive experience for your prospective students looking to engage with your school.

As digital marketing becomes more sophisticated, personalisation has become an increasingly accepted part of online life. Think of how online retail sites like Amazon and eBay offer recommendations based on your previous purchases, or how news outlets allow users to set preferences so they’ll be shown more stories that interest them. No matter where you turn on the internet, organisations are adding personalised elements to provide users with a more unique, customised experience.

With that in mind, an increasing number of schools are now seeking to incorporate elements of personalisation into their online recruitment initiatives. With both millennials and Generation Z growing up as digital natives, many argue that today’s prospective recruits not only expect personalised browsing and targeted campaigns, but welcome these elements as indicators that your school sees their specific, individual needs and motivations as a priority.

Read on to find out some ways you can personalise your student experience.

If your school has a well-developed student recruitment strategy, it’s likely you have clearly defined student personas, and have conducted detailed research into the demographics your prospective applicants fall into, as well as their most common motivations and concerns.

However, it’s important to remember that even among your most common targeted demographic groups, not every prospective student who visits your website will be at the same stage of interest in your school. Some will be hearing about it for the first time, while others will have already done extensive research and may even have applied already.

With that in mind, it’s important to be able to further segment your targeted personas in order to provide content that speaks to their concerns and motivations at every stage of the decision-making process. To accomplish this, recruiters use a technique known as journey mapping, which defines common touchpoints students typically reach before making an application- such as visiting a program page, or receiving recruitment emails- and places them alongside the stages of a traditional sales funnel:

By clearly defining and pinpointing different stages of the enrollment journey, schools can produce more targeted online student recruitment campaigns that engage prospective leads every step of the way. This can help you refine and personalise your strategy in a number of areas, including:

Content- Your blogs, website articles, and other content offerings should be tailored to appeal to prospective students at different stages of the enrollment journey. Once you have designed a student journey map, you can audit your existing onsite content, categorising each page to identify prospective students who aren’t being catered to.

For example, you might find that your content is geared too much towards prospects who are seriously interested or have already applied to your school, and resolve to provide more pieces for potential leads in the ‘awareness’ stage of the student journey.

Example: This blog post from Falmouth University “4 Exciting Careers in Creative App Development” would probably fall into the ‘awareness’ stage of the customer journey, as it provides more general information about the app development industry for interested students.

The University also provides posts for prospective leads who have moved past that stage and developed a firmer interest in the college, such as this post ‘How Flexible Learning Provides Full Support to MA students’ which provides more specific information about their course delivery.

Advertising- Journey mapping can also be used to better segment and target your PPC and digital display ads, helping to maximise their effectiveness and reduce waste in your advertising budget. By considering them alongside different stages of the student journey, PPC ads and their accompanying landing pages can be worded to more effectively engage students during different stages of the decision making process. Your school can also bid on keywords that recruits at particular stages of the student journey are more likely to use in their searches, helping you to further refine your approach.

During the early stages of the student journey, you can use behavioural targeting tools such as Google AdWords in-market audiences function and interest targeting in Facebook to find prospects whose online behaviour corresponds with that of your targeted personas. In addition, you can develop display advertising that targets specific websites that prospective recruits might use for research, such as university comparison sites and career websites.

Example:China Medical University Taiwan are currently running a banner ad campaign on the homepage of the Times Higher Education website. THE’s World University Rankings are universally respected, meaning that a number of highly qualified prospective recruits around the world are likely to use the site to research destinations on the site during the ‘awareness’ stage.

Email Lead Nurturing Campaigns- Journey mapping can also be useful in segmenting your mailing lists to conduct more personalised email marketing campaigns. Rather than sending out generic, ‘one size fits all’ mails, you can divide prospective recruits into crucial touchpoints on their enrollment journey, identifying candidates who have scheduled interviews or signed up at recruitment fairs, for example.

This will allow you to prepare customised messages for each group, providing useful information and linking to targeted content on your website which is relevant to their stage of the enrollment journey. These campaigns can then be further refined by performing A/B testing and monitoring unsubscribe , open, and click-through rates, helping you to identify the best ways to connect with prospective recruits at every stage of the decision-making process.

An emerging and currently less widely used personalisation tool, heatmap analysis measures how users view and interact with your webpages. This can be done through either eyetracking programs, which use cameras and software to monitor exactly what a user views on a web page, or mousetracking, which measures mouse movement to estimate where on the screen a person’s eyes are focused.

Eyetracking is more accurate than mousetracking, but also more costly to implement, and since cameras are required, is usually only conducted in small studies and market research focus groups. Mousetracking on the other hand, can be done in real-time with visitors to your website, and is available through a number of well-known providers such as Crazyegg and Clicktale. Free options such as Clickheat and Corunet are also available.

Example: Crazyegg are one of the leading providers of heatmap tools, and you can see a number of illustrations of what a typical webpage analysis might look like on their website.

Heat map analysis can be used to quickly identify simple errors in the arrangement of your content, such as pages which contain too much text with few images, or ‘banner blindness,’ where site visitors automatically ignore parts of your webpage which contain ads.

The technique has also led to a number of new insights into browsing behaviour for web designers and marketers. For instance, a heat map study conducted by Nielsen Norman revealed that web users will seldom scroll down for information, with the average user spending only 19.7% of their time ‘below the fold’ on a page.

Conducting a heat map analysis of visitors to your school’s website can also reveal a number of more specific insights into your layout. For instance, an unnamed university who are clients of Siteimprove, a marketing software firm who offer their own heat map analysis tool known as Behavior Maps, used the technique to uncover issues on a web page featuring application guidelines for international students. The analysis revealed that two spots of high interaction on the page-the tabs for ‘Application Fees and ‘Language Tests’- were not very easy for users to find at first glance, as they were placed within a large table of inline text.

To add another level of detailed real-time personalisation to your website, you might also want to consider using cookies to customise certain pages for frequent visitors. Cookies are mechanisms which allow your server to store information about a user’s browsing history on their computer, and are used in some way by most websites today.

When applied to your school’s content strategy and development, the information provided by cookies can allow you to sketch out a surprisingly detailed picture of a specific web user’s persona. For instance, a prospective student visiting your site for the first time might browse through pages of courses or faculties that interest them, and then check out more general areas such as accommodation information. They may also look at a particular extracurricular activity that interests them, such as a debating team.

Armed with this information, you can automate certain elements of your website to highlight content that might appeal to them on their next visit. For instance, you could personalise your alumni profiles to show more graduates from the course they are interested in, customise your homepage to display more information on accommodation, or use pop-up messages to suggest relevant articles and news about your debating society.

Example: Many universities have scrolling slideshows on their homepage to highlight articles. By employing real-time tracking on their websites, schools can personalise tools like these based on the user’s previous browsing behaviour. For instance, this article about new campus accommodation that appears in the University of Winnipeg’s slide show could be automated to appear to prospective recruits who had previously checked out accommodation on the site.

This strategy allows you to provide a truly individual experience for visitors to your website, with each user being shown relevant, useful content, increasing your engagement with prospects and their conversion potential.

Another great way of personalising content is to use geolocation tools. IP address targeting and mobile geofencing allows sites to pinpoint the exact location of users and adjust their content accordingly, producing more targeted advertising and articles, and optimise their sites for visitors from different locations.

This can be especially useful when dealing with specific markets in international student recruitment, which may have different tastes and values from your core student base. For example, a survey conducted by World Education Services last year revealed that 58% of Indian masters students saw career prospects as the most important factor when choosing a school, while Chinese students placed more value on an institution’s reputation, with 47% seeing it as their top priority. A school wishing to target these regions might use geolocation to ensure that students from each country see content which speaks more to their motivations when they visit their website.

Schools can also use geolocation for more practical purposes. For instance, IP address targeting allows you to automatically direct users in specific countries to the alternate language version of your site, and can also be used to segment prospects in your mailing lists to ensure your campaigns are managed according to local timezones. After all, no prospective recruit will be happy about being woken up at 4am by an email from your school!

On a more local level, many universities also use geofencing as a way to promote specific events. Geofencing can be used in PPC campaigns in order to promote recruitment fairs or open days to local prospects, while integrated listings- which employ a generic sidebar on your website that can then be filled with a content offer relevant to the user’s location- can also help you court applicants from specific regions.

With each of the above strategies, it is important to exercise caution, and provide students with an experience that is individual while not coming across as overly intrusive. Reviewing your results over time with Google Analytics will help you determine whether the reaction to your efforts is positive, and continue to refine and develop your strategy to better connect with today’s prospective students.

Do you know the dropout rate at your educational institution? Do you know specifically when dropouts tend to occur – such as within the first six months of year one, during the summer before year two, or around the six-year mark? Are you aware of which student groups are most likely to drop out?

The National Student Clearinghouse offers a compelling snapshot of the retention challenges faced by learning institutions across the United States – although, this struggle is certainly not limited to the U.S., and is indeed felt by schools across the globe (the UK just reported a disappointing drop in post-secondary student retention).

The NSC report examines the complex issue of retention from several angles, such as ”enrollment intensity.” This chart reveals that students who attend part-time, or a mix of full and part-time are particularly vulnerable to dropping out; a relevant point for many schools where large groups of students strive to balance part-time coursework with family and employment:

And then we see how age plays out with regard to retention, with older students struggling the most to stay in school and see their training through to completion – another highly relevant factor as mature, non-traditional students fast become a larger pool of prospective applicants for colleges and universities.

The NCS report offers numerous other lenses through which to analyze the problem of student retention, persistence, and achievement, underscoring the enormous importance of relationship-building for schools. With so much emphasis on recruitment and enrollment – of simply getting students through the front door – it’s easy to lose sight of the end goal, which is to guide those same students successfully through to graduation. And in many ways, this is a much more complex task.

This post offers ideas for fostering the kinds of supportive connections students need to stay enrolled and thrive at your institution, addressing both academic and non-academic challenges.

We’ll look at examples from leading schools, and discuss the digital tools and approaches your team could leverage to target your own unique retention challenges.

1. Create Purpose-driven, Supportive Student Communities Online

Why is helping students connect with one another online important for retention? Because thriving, purpose-driven communities help students form positive relationships with like-minded peers – and draw support from those relationships during challenging times at school. According to the NSSE, supportive, encouraging interactions with peers on campus is a key “engagement indicator” and critical factor in student retention. Go a step further and extend your campus-based student groups into digital spaces, where you can promote membership to an even wider audience.

Harvard’s done a great job of inviting students to share personal stories and connect with one another online through its First Generation Student Union project. Harvard recognizes that first gen’s represent a growing share of its (and many other institutions’) student population, and that first generation students are particularly vulnerable to academic pressure and financial challenges (the two top contributors to drop out rates).

Here’s a look at the Harvard First Generation Student web page:

The First Generation Student Union pledges its commitment to the “welfare and community representation of first generation students at Harvard” – and they achieve that goal by giving voice to that community online in a variety of ways. Here’s a Facebook post under the Union’s student-led #primuspride campaign, which highlights the struggles, accomplishments, and everyday lives of current first-gen students at Harvard – in their own words and images.

And here’s a post celebrating a first-gen student who has won a prestigious fellowship, accompanied by an out-pouring of support from fellow community-members. This is precisely the kind of encouragement students need to feel seen, heard, and at home at your school – which in turn goes a long way toward keeping them enrolled.

Wondering how to get started with a similar online group initiative? Focus on student personas you know are most at risk for dropping out at your institution. In Harvard’s case, it’s first generation students, but at your school it may be online students or part-time mature students juggling classes with jobs and family. Look closely at the challenges and pain-points of your target personas, at the specific factors that could jeopardize their capacity or willingness to stay enrolled.

The goal is to create personalized spaces online where these students can build their own community of support. Your school could ask a few ambassadors to get the ball rolling in terms of content (which is what Harvard has done), and to play a key role in encouraging their peers to get involved, contribute stories, share accomplishments, and provide encouragement during difficult times.

2. Promote Your Campus Support Services Consistently & Creatively

It’s not enough to list your campus support services on your school website, or mention them from time to time on your social media channels.

Important resources, such as academic counselling, free tutoring, career planning, and alumni mentorship should be showcased regularly – and creatively – with updates, reminders, and stories of student involvement.

Students often need encouragement to seek out help. Making your campus services more visible and approachable online is an important first step to reaching out to and connecting with students at risk of dropping out.

Money concerns, workload anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed in the face of new challenges are three of the top 5 reasons students drop out of college. It’s crucial for schools to highlight the availability – and social acceptability – of seeking help from official campus support organizations. If these resources are never talked about online in ways that normalize and encourage participation, students tend to feel embarrassed to seek them out, or are simply unaware of their existence.

Here’s a great idea from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), who uses Facebook to promote the wide range of services offered by the campus Health and Wellness Centre. In this post, OCAD is welcoming students to come and de-stress around exam time with free chair massages, free healthy snacks, visits with the resident therapy dog, free guided yoga, and more. This isn’t your typical, dry ”come and speak with a counsellor” message – there’s really something for everyone in the offer, and it’s delivered in a light-hearted way that reduces the stigma around seeking help for stress and anxiety:

Advanced tip:

To highlight your campus support services in genuine and meaningful ways, regularly post stories of students who have leveraged these resources to their advantage, incorporating it into your larger content strategy and development plan. From seeking help with finances or exam stress, to receiving assistance with a research project – ask students to contribute anecdotes (mini blog posts, videos, etc.) of how your supportive staff helped them face a challenge, or relieve a source of anxiety.

Ryerson University pulls this off quite well by running a blog post series on financial management, combining expert advice with real student stories in ways that will resonate with (rather than “lecture”) students. Ryerson calls this campaign #RUMONEYSMART, cleverly integrating the university’s initials into the hashtag:

3. Offer a New Student Orientation App

The stats are bleak on freshman retention rates. In the U.S., as many as one in three first year students drop out before reaching year two. In the UK, drop-out rates among freshman have increased for the first time in four years – from 5.7% to 6%. That figure moves up to 8.2% among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A survey of 1200 college “freshers” in the UK found that a whopping 27% were contemplating withdrawing from their institution during the summer break before year two.

What’s contributing to this first-year drop-out phenomenon? In many cases, students are buckling under the pressures of post-secondary life: adjusting to a new environment, juggling a busier schedule, keeping up with important deadlines, and managing higher academic expectations.

Developing a new student orientation app is one way your school can take the edge off transitioning to college or university. It’s not a cure-all for the emotional ups and downs of freshman life, but it can certainly help new students manage those crucial early weeks with reminders, maps, event schedules, links to social media freshman groups, and other tools that help newcomers feel less overwhelmed. Apps can also serve as an important element of branding for schools, helping to further promote your school’s unique identity and culture among new students from day one.

Here’s a good example from the University of Michigan, whose app is specifically designed to help freshman take control and stay on track during orientation:

4. Use Automated Software for Early Risk-Detection & Intervention

For struggling students, the downward spiral toward dropping out can happen quite quickly. For example, a few missed classes leads to a failed term paper, which leads to a poor midterm grade, which leads to a lost scholarship, which leads to financial roadblocks, which leads to withdrawal from the program.

Recognizing those early warning signs and intervening right away is key to helping students cope with setbacks, correct misguided habits, and identify helpful strategies for staying in – and thriving at – school.

But when you’ve got thousands of students, and no streamlined way to track and act upon those early warning signs, timely intervention can seem impossible.

This is where automated retention software enters the picture, helping educational institutions better predict and respond to at-risk behaviors that typically lead to dropping out.

There are several tools to choose from. One option, Persistence Plus, uses a “behavioral nudging model” to deliver text messages to students at just the right time, reminding them to study for an upcoming test, begin working on an assignment, take note of an approaching project deadline, etc. These messages are customized to each student’s profile and the real-time responses each one provides regarding their personal challenges and aspirations. The goal is to provide timely, targeted, personalized support to students who are struggling to keep up with the demands of college-level academics. Clients of Persistence Plus include Middlesex Community College and the University of Washington (Tacoma), and the reported results are quite encouraging:

Starfish is another platform that strives to identify and intervene in high-risk situations early on, to help students stay on track. Once synced with your school’s data systems, Starfish can send out messages to let students know you’re concerned about their academic performance, or to congratulate them (send what Starfish calls a “kudo”) for a job well done.

Students can also book advising, tutoring, and financial aid appointments through the system. Integrated solutions like Starfish can go a long way toward stopping that rapid descent down the drop-out spiral that claims so many college and university students, particularly in their freshman year.

5. Create Opportunities to Engage with Alumni Online

While on-campus career fairs and student-alumni mentoring sessions are extremely valuable, it’s important to note that not all students will be able to attend these events. Others will simply feel too shy to approach an alum with their questions or percolating fears. Nonetheless, research has shown just how important mentorship is to both student recruitment and student retention. Individuals who feel uncertain about their program choice and unsure of their capacity to secure employment after graduation are at high risk for dropping out. Crises of confidence put the expense and effort of earning the degree into question, which in turn jeopardizes academic performance and justifies withdrawal.

Why not offer ways to engage meaningfully with participating alumni online? And then promote those exchanges across your marketing channels to get the word out that you offer students real-world solutions and actionable advice – from people who have actually been in their shoes.

Here’s a great example from Princeton University, who recently held an alumni-student “chat” event wherein students submitted questions to, and received advice from, grads in their field. Here’s a look at the promotional video on YouTube, which shows just how important is it to intervene swiftly and meaningfully when students are feeling doubtful about their future paths:

Here’s another example from Ivan Allen College (Georgia Tech), who uses Twitter to connect alumni with liberal arts students in search of career advice:

Participating students tweeted questions, and alumni answered them with helpful advice, lessons they’d learned over the years, and encouragement.

While some topics were general in nature, others were very specific to Georgia Tech liberal arts students:

Offering students (particularly populations at high risk for dropping out) opportunities to connect with alumni is crucial for helping them believe in the value of their credential – and that the academic struggle is well worth the end reward. Institutional promises in this regard cannot match the strength of genuine alumni stories, advice, and support.

While drop-outs may still occur, each of these five strategies provides your institution with a way to guard against attrition. By building nurturing relationships with your students and letting them know that your school can help them cope with whatever problems they may be facing, you can provide the support base they need to bounce back and make a success of their education.

Questions or comments about student engagement and retention at your school? Please feel free to share them in the space below!